pretreatment package GreenField’s Centre of Excellence in Engineering, Technology, Research and Development, located in Chatham, opened in 2008. by the end of the year, before the com-pany begins engineering its first bolt-on cellulosic facility. Wortzman said Green-Field expects to begin building its first bolt-on plant in 2014. He also says the company is working on a sustainable biomass supply chain, focusing on a combination of cobs/stover and purpose-grown energy crops, that includes its own trial planting program. Why did the company focus on pretreat-ment? Because it’s the key to commer-cialization, says Wortzman. “The objective is to recover the most C5 and C6 sugars, in their cleanest form, for optimal downstream hydro-lysis and fermentation. Others focused on enzymes and yeasts, but we focused on pretreatment, became experts in this field and succeeded in what we believe is a superior pretreatment process.” GreenField pioneered a two-stage process which involves cooking the bio-mass in two steps. The first is to liquefy, separate and recover the C5 sugars so they will not “inhibit” the second step, which is conducted under more ex-treme conditions to expose the cellulose fraction and recover highly digestible C6 sugars. The extruder – actually there are two extruders in the process – was “modified” after GreenField attempted to use off-the-shelf machinery. “We tried to adapt it to our needs, but the costs proved prohibitive at a commercial scale, so we Processing Systems for Bioenergy Liberating Untapped Energy A worldwide leader in size reduction technology for bioenergy, Vecoplan works with individual customers to design, engineer, manufacture and implement technologically advanced, material specific, and application specific shredding, ferrous and non-ferrous removal, size and density separation, screening and classification technologies and extremely efficient conveyor and bulk material handling, metering, storage and unloading technologies. Contact Vecoplan today to learn more about our existing systems or to arrange a visit to one, or several, of our installations. Phone: (336) 252-4774 vecoplanllc.com 16 Canadian BIOMASS January/February 2013
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