The Plantrose® process uses supercritical water to reduce costs in conversion of biomass to cellulosic sugars. The process will economically enable a multitude of renewable process technologies to access the market for high volume, low-cost, broadly-sourced cellulosic sugars.
Bill Gates highlighted the need to decarbonize the industrial sector and the possibility to produce cost-competitive biofuels. Total had initially invested in Renmatix in 2015, and aside from the expanded investment this year, Total has also signed a licensing agreement with Renmatix for 1 million tons of cellulosic sugar production capacity annually, at Total’s discretion to build corresponding facilities.
Renmatix has also been expanding its product portfolio with additional bio-based building block intermediates, including omno-polymers and crystalline cellulose. According to the company website, omno-polymers are based on lignin that are pulled away when the company’s Plantrose® cellulosic sugars are hydrolyzed from the cellulose. The resulting lignin can be used as a substitute for many different types of polymers such as epoxy resins and chemicals such as phenols .
Lignin tends to be reactive and sticky, requiring special attention in order to separate it from cellulose. This, therefore, often lead to further processing and higher costs to make them useful in targeted markets. The traditional approach, according to Renmatix, is to add strong chemicals, often including sulfur-based contaminants. This is typically done in pulp and paper processing when lignin is removed from paper pulp using the so called Kraft process. This leaves the lignin in a poor sate that prevents its further usage other than as combustible has limited the lignin market substantially.
Renmatix said its Plantrose® process can remove lignin using only water, and the resulting co-product has no offensive smell, is clean and highly functional for higher-value applications. The company’s omno lignin polymers can reportedly be tailored to meet customer needs with tunable characteristics like molecular weight and particle size.
There has been considerable research in the industry for higher value end uses of lignin such as conversion to adhesives, epoxy resins for carbon fibers, thermoplastics and commodity chemicals like BTX (benzene, toluene, xylene).
This blog has reported the potentialities of functional lignin in many articles to be found under the keyword “lignin“
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