Friday, September 11, 2009

The €8.2 million NEMO (Novel high performance enzymes and micro-organisms for conversion of lignocellulosic biomass to bioethanol) project, which has received funding of €5.9 million from the EU, is aimed at developing manufacturing methods for liquid biofuel from agricultural and forestry waste, such as straw and wood chips.

The project is coordinated by VTT and has participants from a number of European research institutes and industrial producers of enzymes, ethanol and chemicals, including: the University of Helsinki (Finland), the Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main (Germany), the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (Switzerland), the Universita Degli Studi di Milano (Italy), Dyadic Nederland BV (the Netherlands), Green Sugar GmbH (Germany), Sekab E-Technology (Sweden), and Roal Oy (Finland).

Currently, nearly all biofuel is produced using first generation technology, which is mainly based on the use of sucrose contained in feedstocks such as sugarcane, or starch-based glucose contained in corn. Apart from sugarcane, current feedstocks mean than production methods are not sufficiently energy efficient and they do not have a big enough impact on reducing carbon dioxide emissions. The NEMO project will last four years, and aims to develop the next, second generation production technology for the utilisation of lignocellulose raw material in the production of ethanol. Agricultural and forestry waste is mainly lignocellulose, which consists of sugars but in a form that makes them difficult to be used by microbes in the production of ethanol.

The project develops enzymes that can be used to cut lignocellulose into sugar compounds suitable for fermentation. The objective is also to tailor the metabolism of microbes so that they can produce large volumes of ethanol out of the biomass sugars economically and efficiently. The project evaluates the suitability of the developed enzymes and yeast strains for industrial biofuel manufacturing processes.

The production of ethanol consists of four stages: the pre-processing of the raw material, the conversion of carbohydrates from polymers into sugar, the fermentation of sugar into ethanol using microbes and the distillation of ethanol. Different technologies are being globally developed for pre-processing the raw material. The NEMO project focuses on the pre-processing methods, hydrolysing cellulose using enzymes and the fermentation of the created sugars using tailored microbes.

According to the project coordinator Merja Penttilä, Research Professor at VTT, yeasts are excellent production organisms, suitable for large scale industrial production. Using enzymes, sugars can be released gently from the lignocellulose so that the sugar solution is not too toxic to microbes.

The EU has set a recommendation for its member states with the aim of replacing 5.75% of traffic fuel with biofuels by 2010 and a mandatory target of 10% renewable energy sources in traffic by 2020. As a result, projects such as NEMO are essential if we are to develop new technologies for ensuring bioethanol can be produced in a cost-effective and environmentally-friendly manner.