Global environmental situation creates an urgent need for more sustainable transportation fuels. Ethanol made from lignocellulosic biomass is suitable for substituting fossil fuels in transportation and has potential to reduce greenhouse gas emission by up to 80%, compared to fossil fuels. Lignocellulose-based ethanol utilizes agricultural or forestry waste and does not involve crops otherwise dedicated for human food or animal feed. However, economic feasibility of this production approach has been a challenge for the industry. The project aims to close this gap by introducing a novel fermentation process with superior productivity and lower operational and capital expenses. In this project, a novel fermentation concept, CoRyFee, will be further developed and demonstrated in near-industrial scale. This technology is superior to those on the market due to its performance and unparalleled feedstock flexibility. It will enable use of softwood – feed stock that cannot currently be effectively utilized by any available technology. The project combines capabilities of the technology partners, Terranol and SEKAB, and will be done in cooperation with a potential customer, Kanteleen Voima in Finland. This will ensure meeting customer expectations to performance and product business model, therefore creating solid foundation for commercialization. Upon successful completion of the project, the technology has the potential to become the primary fermentation technology used in fuel ethanol plants. Productised to be sold on the license basis, it will become commercially available by 2021 and create significant business opportunity for the partners, with 6 plants expected to be built using the technology by 2025. This will result in new R&D, engineering and operations job creation. Most importantly, development of this high-performing technology will help meet the growing demand for more sustainable fuels and support reaching the EU environmental targets in emission reduction.

The ReTAPP project aims at producing wood-based fructose for production of plastic bottles and all plastic packaging. The ReTAPP project will generate fructose from wood to commercial process as a replacement for food/starch based fructose. The fructose is further converted to 5-hydroxymethylfurfural (5-HMF) – a chemical that can be used to produce a biobased polymer, Polyethylene Furanoate (PEF). Ultimately, ReTAPP will make it possible to make the plastics from wood – a solution not just sustainable and 100% renewable, but also technically and economically superior to the technologies and materials used today. In ReTAPP, the consortium will improve the processes through enzymatic solutions to positively impact quality, performance and economics: In the end, the wood-based fructose must be better than food-based fructose for further in chemical conversion in industrial scale. Even more importantly, the overall process, including but not limited to the fructose conversion, is also made economically more sustainable than the petroleum or the food-based solutions. Ultimately, the 100% renewable packaging is more affordable and has better qualities, such as barrier properties, than the most common thermoplastic resin: polyethylene terephthalate (PET). ReTAPP enables the collaboration between consortium members to address the entire value-chain and achieve objectives none of the companies could achieve alone. European competitive advantage can be found in strength of collaboration between masters of their field, such as MetGen, SEKAB and Avantium.

ValChem demonstrates the technical and economic viability of sustainable and integrated process from wood to a selected platform chemical and lignin based performance chemicals. ValChem will demonstrate that this process can produce wood-based chemicals that are competitive with identical or similar-in-application products based on fossil raw materials in terms of quality and production cost. ValChem utilizes existing demonstration plants of the project partners. All process parts have been demonstrated at least in pilot scale before. "Wood to sugars and crude lignin process" has been verified in demonstration scale for ethanol production, but in this project it will be combined with "sugar to platform chemical" process, for which the company has been using first generation sugars so far. Crude lignin from wood disintegration process will be upgraded to be suitable for reactive applications (different types of reactive resins). The process will demonstrate the valorization of over 75 % of the wood raw material. Pre-marketing and application tests are done at potential customers. Lignin based performance chemicals’ focus is in high value added reactive applications (value >6 times higher than lignin energy value). The largest markets for the targeted platform chemical are unsaturated polyester resins, paints and coatings, and industrial (heat-transfer and de-icing) and personal care (value 2-3 times higher than current products). Potential plants based on this technology will be located in rural areas due to feedstock availability. Only sustainably sourced wood will be used. The sustainable forestry and wood-harvesting will be proven by internationally accepted PEFC and FSC certificates. The ValChem project will be a boost in the Biobased chemical development and open up for further actors to invest in and continue the development for a sustainable industrial sector.

The overall objective of BioCatPolymers is to demonstrate a sustainable and efficient technological route to convert low quality residual biomass to high added-value biopolymers. The technology is based on an integrated hybrid bio-thermochemical process combining the best features of both. The biological step consists of the efficient conversion of biomass-derived sugars to mevalonolactone (MVL). MVL can be then converted to bio-monomers via highly selective chemocatalytic processes. BioCatPolymers is specifically aiming at the efficient and economic production of isoprene and 3-methyl 1,5-pentanediol (3MPD), two momoners with very large markets that can be further processed in the existing infrastructure for fossil-based polymers for the production of elastomers and polyurethanes, respectively. This ambitious target will be attained by optimizing and demonstrating the entire value chain on 0.5 ton of biomass/day scale, starting from the pretreatment of lignocellulosic biomass to hydrolysis and biological fermentation to MVL, separation of MVL from fermentation broth, selective catalytic conversion to the targeted monomer and finally purification to polymer grade quality. The novel approach we propose in this project surpasses the impediments of traditional solely bio-based approaches. It aims at producing bio-isoprene at 50% cost reduction and 3MPD at 70% cost reduction compared to average market prices, by optimizing the platform cell factories and all downstream processes and integrating the process modules, thereby increasing the competitiveness of biological processes in terms of economics. The BioCatPolymers consortium consists of highly qualified and experienced researchers with complementary expertise. Trans-disciplinary considerations are strongly involved in the project. The strong industrial leadership-driven innovation potential is reflected through the fact that the large majority of the partners are from industry.

REWOFUEL goal is to demonstrate the performances, reliability, environmental and socio-economic sustainability of the entire value chain, for the transformation of residual soft-wood into hydrolysate (RWH), conversion of RWH into bio-Isobutene (bio-IBN) by fermentation and further conversion to biofuels. To achieve these goals a team of 11 partners, leaders in their field, originating from 7 EU-member states, will join efforts. REWOFUEL consists in showcasing the value chain, from residual wood to 3 high performance drop-in biofuels derived from bio-IBN. These biofuels are full-bio-ETBE, bio-isooctane and bio-isododecane rich biofuels. This large market is today supplied entirely by products derived from fossil-based IBN. Products derived from bio-based IBN, using the same process as fossil-based IBN, would provide a true renewable alternative. REWOFUEL includes the development & up-scaling of this process and the valorization of coproducts: lignin, microbial biomass, biogas and fertilizers. To this end, four ambitious objectives were defined: -Demonstrate the production of residual wood hydrolysate (RWH) and establish a quality standard to feed the IBN fermentation unit, -Demonstrate the production of bio-IBN-based biofuels from RWH at pre-commercial scale, -Demonstrate the valorization of lignin and other coproducts resulting from the RWH process, -Determine and validate the targeted technical, safety, economic as well as environmental/social sustainability performances to be achieved for a commercial plant. This project aligns with the core innovation strategies of 2 SMEs which are: deconstructing of wood (SEKAB, SWE) and conversion of sugars/hydrolysates into bio-IBN (GBE, FR). These 2 SMEs are already operating a demo plant that they intend to further upgrade within the project. Related Work packages, tasks, milestones and risks are considered in order to achieve these objectives. REWOFUEL project is fully aligned with the call topic.