Cellulosic ethanol technology based on bacteria “is extremely sensitive to infections, making it very difficult to scale up. Although it is not impossible to keep such large systems completely free of infections, it is simply too expensive.” That is the opinion of Ger Bemer, Chief Executive Officer of Royal Nedalco, in an interview with Ethanol Statistics this week.
Nedalco has chosen to skip the pilot plant phase and is now planning to build a full scale cellulosic ethanol production plant in Sas van Gent (the Netherlands), with an annual production capacity of approximately 200 million litres. A remarkable step, considering the increasing number of announced pilot plants in the E.U. and U.S.
“We are able to skip the pilot plant phase because our production technology is based on yeast, rather than bacteria” Mr. Bemer explains. “It’s a technology that we as an alcohol producer are very familiar with because it has been the work horse in the industry for years. We know how it reacts on a relatively small scale, and because it is a fairly robust system, we are confident that we can predict how it will react when implemented on a full size industrial scale.”
The entire interview, titled ‘First Cellulosic Ethanol Will Come From Yeast’, can be found
here. In the article, Mr. Bemer discusses the process of building a cellulosic ethanol plant. He explains the importance of time-to-market in this particular field and discusses three market developments that are key to the development of cellulosic ethanol.