Below is the text version of the webinar “Cost-Effectively Optimize and Scale Bioenergy Technologies with the Consortium for Computational Physics and Chemistry,” presented by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Bioenergy Technologies Office in October 2022. Watch the video.
[Begin presentation]
Erik Ringle, National Renewable Energy Laboratory
Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's webinar, “Cost-Effectively Optimize and Scale Bioenergy Technologies with the Consortium for Computational Physics and Chemistry.” I'm Erik Ringle from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and before we get started I'd like to cover some housekeeping items so you know how you can participate in the webinar today.
You will be in listen-only mode during the webinar. You can select audio connection options to listen through your computer audio, or you can dial into your phone. For the best connection, we recommend calling in through a phone line. You need to submit questions for our panelists today using the Q&A panel. If you are currently in full-screen view, click the question mark icon located at the floating toolbar at the lower right side of your screen. That will open the Q&A panel. If you're in split-screen mode, that Q&A panel is already open and is also located at the lower right side of your screen. To submit your question, simply select all panelists in that Q&A drop-down menu, type in your question or comments, and press enter on your keyboard. It's as simple as that. You may send in those questions at any time during the presentations. We will collect these and time permitting address them during the Q&A session at the end. Now, if you have technical difficulties or need help during today's session, I want to direct your attention to the chat section. The chat section is different from the Q&A panel we just discussed, and it appears as a comments bubble in your control panel. Your questions or comments in the chat section only come to me, so please be sure to use that Q&A panel for content questions for our panelists. Automated closed captioning is available for the event today. To turn it on, select show closed captions at the lower left side of your screen. We are also recording this webinar. We will post it on the Bioenergy Technologies Office website in the coming weeks, along with these slides. Please see the URL provided on the screen here. Now, if you're interested in learning about BETO news, events, and funding opportunities, we also invite you to sign up to the BETO mailing list shown here. I will post links to both of these resources in the chat here in a moment. Now a quick disclaimer: This webinar, including all audio and images of participants and presentation materials, may be recorded, saved, edited, distributed, used internally, posted on the U.S. Department of Energy's website, or otherwise made publicly available. If you continue to access this webinar and provide such audio or image content, you consent to such use by or on behalf of DOE and the government for government purposes and acknowledge that you will not inspect or approve or be compensated for such use. All right, with that I'll now turn things over to Justin Rickard to introduce our topic and our panelists. Take it away, Justin.
Justin Rickard, National Renewable Energy Laboratory
All right, thank-you, Erik. Can you hear me OK?
Erik Ringle
Yes, I can.
Justin Rickard
All right, and welcome, everybody to our webinar, “Cost-Effectively Optimize and Scale Bioenergy Technologies with the Consortium for Computational Physics and Chemistry.” I'm Justin Rickard with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Just a few more items before we get to the presentations. This webinar is brought to you by the Bioenergy Communicators Working Group, also known as BioComms. This group is sponsored by the U.S Department of Energy's Bioenergy Technologies Office, also known as BETO. The BioComms working group includes bioenergy communicators, laboratory relationship managers, and education and workforce development professionals from the national labs and the BETO program who gather once a month to strategize on how to effectively communicate and promote BETO-funded research to the public. The BioComms working group also provides the public the opportunity to learn about current and emerging bioenergy technologies, projects, and partnerships through monthly webinars, which brings me to the agenda for today's webinar.
We have four speakers today. Dr. Jim Parks from Oak Ridge National Laboratory will provide an overview of the BETO-funded Consortium for Computational Physics and Chemistry, also known as CCPC. And then we will have three bioenergy industry partners speak about their company's work with CCPC. Those speakers are Dr. Jim Dooley, Dr. Kevin Barnett, and Joaquín Alarcón. Next slide.
Before we get started, I'd like to provide the presenter bios in order of their appearance. Dr. Jim Parks leads the energy and Industrial decarbonization section in the Manufacturing Sciences Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, also known as ORNL. Prior to joining ORNL, Dr. Parks worked in the private sector at EmeraChem LLC, where he specialized in lean nitrogen oxide trapped catalyst research and commercialization for power generation and transportation applications. Upon joining ORNL, he conducted research on catalysis and emissions control for advanced combustion engines and renewable fuels at ORNL's National Transportation Research Center. His current research interests include catalysis for biomass to fuel processes, clean hydrogen production, carbon capture and utilization, modeling of reactor systems, advanced spectroscopic technique development, and novel applications of nanophase materials. Dr. Park serves in the following leadership roles for the Bioenergy Technologies Office: principal investigator of CCPC, steering committee for the Chemical Catalysis for Bioenergy Consortium, and co-lead of high-temperature conversion task in the Feedstock Conversion Interface Consortium. Dr. Parks received his B.S. in physics from North Carolina State University and his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Tennessee.
Dr. James Dooley is co-founder and chief technology officer of Forest Concepts LLC in Auburn, Washington. Dr. Dooley has built his career by combining a deep understanding of plant biology, cellulosic biomass material properties, disciplined engineering design, and business development to create innovative products, processes, and equipment. Before co-founding Forest Concepts in 1998, Dr. Dooley held a number of engineering, technical management, and business development positions with the Weyerhaeuser company in the forest products industry and with Amfac agricultural group in the sugar cane and tropical fruit Industries. Dr. Dooley holds engineering degrees from Cal Poly, UC Davis, and the University of Washington. He is a registered professional engineer in the state of Washington.
Dr. Kevin Barnett is co-founder and chief technology officer of Pyran, a company producing renewable five carbon chemicals used in paints and coatings. Dr. Barnett completed his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he invented Pyran’s technology and co-founded the company along with Professor George Huber. Dr. Barnett has since raised Pyran‘s seed and series A financing as well as overseeing the scale-up of Pyran’s technology by over a thousand times to produce several tons of product.
And with an international background in Europe, the United States, and Latin America, Joaquín Alarcón has more than three decades of experience managing large corporations and multimillion dollar projects in renewable energy, agribusiness, technology development, industrial construction, and information technology sectors. He has established new markets for new products worldwide and served on the boards of directors of numerous companies. He is currently the founder and CEO of Catalyxx, Inc., a technology company that transforms ethanol into higher value chemicals, and of Arc International, a boutique consulting company specializing in the development and financing of renewable energy projects. Joaquin previously held top executive positions with several companies in Spain, Brazil, Missouri, Nebraska, and California under the umbrella of the multinational Spanish company at Abengoa SA and its subsidiary Abengoa Bioenergia SA. Joaquin holds a master's degree in chemical engineering and environmental management and engineering as well as holding an MBA. He is fluent in English, Spanish, and Portuguese, has permanent resident status in Brazil, and has dual U.S. and Spanish citizenship.
Before I hand it over to Dr. Parks, I'd like to remind you that you can ask questions at any time during the presentation using the Q&A panel. We will collect these and try to address them during the Q&A session at the end of the presentation, time permitting. All right, next slide, and Dr. Parks, please take it away.
Dr. Jim Parks, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Thank-you. Yes, I'm pleased to give a short overview of the Consortium for Computational Physics and Chemistry and then turn it over to our valued industry partners about some of the exciting projects we've been doing with them now. Go ahead and go to the next slide, please.
So, our consortium is built to apply multiscale computational science to enable and accelerate the bioenergy economy. And we do that by working internally with the different consortia in the Bioenergy Technologies Office. Those are shown at the right here. And we also do that by working externally with industry representatives and other members of the bioenergy field in the private sector. And our consortia is composed of six different national labs, Oak Ridge National Lab, the National Energy Technology Laboratory, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Idaho National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Go ahead and go to the next slide, please.
So one of our primary themes that we've had since the origin of our consortium in 2013 is a multiscale problem, a multilab solution. By design we're bringing together the talent at all the six different national labs in this consortia to work together to cover the broad scales of physical and chemical phenomena that occur in the challenging field of converting biomass into transportation of fuel and products. So on the left you see we start a lot of that at the very lowest scales in terms of some of our modeling capabilities. We're doing atomic scale modeling of catalyst. And we have three different national labs involved in that effort, and that's really critical to understanding the chemical reactions that occur at catalysts, which are used in many of the processes to convert biomass into fuel. A lot of detailed information you can get and guidance you can give to experimentalists because at the nanoscale it's very difficult to measure things experimentally. But we can model and understand from a theoretical perspective what kind of energy transitions there are for good conversion that we want to see for making transportation fuels. Then we also do modeling at the mesoscale, and this modeling actually covers both biomass and other feedstock material as well as the catalyst. So catalyst particles are something that we model within the mesoscale. And then we're also modeling the conversion processes for biomass, whether it's a wood fragment or perhaps municipal solid waste. We have the ability to model those complex structures in their particle form and give predictive information on how they're converting into oils and liquids and gases and so forth that can go into the biomass-to-fuel processes. So NREL and Idaho National Lab are the labs working in that area. And then finally, everybody wants to see the scale-up of these exciting bioenergy technologies to scales that will really make a difference. And when we start talking about those scales, we're talking about reactors. And our consortium has the ability to do conversion modeling at reactor scales. And we can actually model quite a number of reactor designs and types, and we'll talk about that in the coming slides. The National Energy Technology Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory are two of the labs doing that research. Next slide, please.
So this gives you an overview of what a catalyst reactor looks like. In this case, this is a fixed-bed catalyst reactor. The reactor is filled with catalyst that in this case we're showing spherical catalysts that could be different shapes. We’re modeling that reactor, but we also model what's happening in those individual catalyst particles, because the temperature varies as a function of that shape in that particle as well as the reactant concentration. So we have the reactants coming in and then the conversion happening in the catalyst particle and producing the fuels and oils that that will go on to be transportation fuels. So we have the ability to model these fixed-bed catalyst reactors. And the important thing here to note is we are covering that wide range of scales and absolutely the understanding the phenomena that occurring in the individual catalyst particles as well. Go ahead to the next slide, please.
And we had the ability to dig down deeper into each individual catalyst particle's performance. During many of these processes, you have coking, which is where carbon builds up on the catalyst, and that actually slows down, of course, the reactant actions that you want to occur. But we're able to understand that coking as it happens in these catalyst particles with our mesoscale modeling. And that's really important because each chemical reaction that we're looking at in bioenergy has its own rate that it happens, but the effective rate of any catalyst or any reactor is dependent on many more factors, like how fast the reactant gases can get to the catalyst site, and how fast the product gases actually come out of the catalyst particle. So by taking into all these parameters and considerations, we can actually come up with the true effective conversion rates and processes for an individual catalyst particle in a full reactor. Next slide, please.
So another type of reactor are moving bed reactors, or fluidized bed reactors. In these cases, for these reactors, the catalyst actually moves in the reactor. And this is showing a riser reactor. On the left we're showing a model built in the MFIX computational fluid dynamics software that was actually built and designed by the National Energy Technology Laboratory. And they've applied that tool to model a reactor that's in the Department of Energy system at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. This is their R Cube catalytic upgrading reactor. In this reactor, catalyst flow up this column, this riser column, and then those catalysts interact with pyrolysis vapors and convert the pyrolysis vapors into a much more friendly oil and hydrocarbon form that could go on to be a transportation fuel. So it's a very important part of the process to take out the oxygen from bio oils and turn, convert it, into a much more manageable hydrocarbon to go into fuels. So if you go to the next slide.
I want to highlight some things we've been doing with that reactor. Specifically we've actually developed a bioenergy-specific kinetics that cover all the chemical reactions, the primary ones that are occurring in this process. And then we combine the fluidization and the movements of the catalyst and flows of the catalyst and the reactant gases in that column to end up with a computational fluid dynamic model. And the results shown on the right, which shows that we're able to predict each type of chemistry that's produced in this reactor as a function of time. It's a quite dynamic process. And as you can see, the computational fluid dynamics models actually give us a lot of visualization of what's happening in the reactor, which is highly valuable to the researchers because it's, of course, very difficult and expensive to make experimental measurements to cover all the dynamic processes that are occurring in these types of reactors. And next slide, please.
So today you're going to hear from three of our valued industry partners and some projects that we've been working with them where we've been supporting their efforts in bioenergy. And I want to first highlight, though, the CCPC modelers that have contributed to the work that you will hear today. We have Yidong Xia from Idaho National Laboratory and Peter Ciesielski from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory have been working with the Forest Concepts team. And then we have Canan Karakaya and Bruce Adkins from Oak Ridge National Laboratory have been working with Pyran and also Catalyxx. And we'd also like to give a shout-out to the technology managers in the Bioenergy Technologies Office, in particular Trevor Smith, who's our technology manager for the CCPC. This is an outstanding group of modelers and with a lot of experience and a lot of capability. So go ahead to the next slide.
As I mentioned we've been working with Forest Concepts, Pyran, and Catalyxx, and we're really pleased to have Jim Dooley and Kevin Barnett and Joaquín Alarcón speak about the projects we’ve been working with them. These particular projects were supported by the Department of Energy and the Bioenergy Technologies Office in a program called the Direct Funded Opportunity Program that was specific to the CCPC tool set. So we're really excited to have them speak about these projects and their company's endeavors in bioenergy as we help enable the successes for these three companies. Next slide, please.
So first we're going to have Jim Dooley speak. Jim is the chief technology officer of Forest Concepts. So Jim, go ahead and take it away.
Dr. James Dooley, Forest Concepts, LLC
Thank-you, Jim Parks, for an excellent overview, and happy Bioenergy Day, everyone on this call. I'm Jim Dooley, co-founder and chief technology officer at Forest Concepts. As noted earlier, we're in the Seattle, Washington, area. The project that I'll describe involves NREL and INL. To better explain our “crumbles” feedstock materials and why they have flow ability and conversion performance attributes that has been experienced by universities, labs, and other users across the emerging bioeconomy in the last 10 years. In Jim's earlier talk, our project is at the particle modeling and mesoscales. Next slide.
Forest Concepts was formed in 1998 with a focus to use forest industry waste and forest management debris as industrial materials to create jobs and economic activity in rural communities. Today we work with all plant-based materials from agriculture, urban, and forest sources. Our technical solutions to plant biomass processing enable the production of biofuels and bioproducts across the emerging bioeconomy. We're a small private company with 10 full-time employees plus a broad category of cooperators across industry, academia, and these national labs. Next slide.
What sets us apart from other companies in the bioeconomy is that we focus on the big deal problems throughout the supply chain such as logistics, costs, production reactor-ready feedstocks, biomass drying energy, and enabling high-conversion efficiencies. We develop new material, formats, processes, and equipment. To do that we need to know the first principles at work within particles and across bulk materials as our systems interact with the plants and the biomass bulk materials that derive from processing. Next slide.
The “Forest Concepts Preprocessing Technology” was a cute title they gave us. It is really the crumbles rotary shearing milling system that we've developed over the last 15 years with DOE support that's replacing hammer mills and the resulting, what's called crumble's feedstocks, that are produced by it. A little history. Back in 2005, DOE BETO engineers [inaudible], John Farrell and Sam Tagore saw what we were doing to produce a technical erosion control material with equipment that used only about one-third the power of other wood processing methods. In our first meeting, Sam Tagore explained that one of the big deal needs was to make wood and ag biomass into feedstocks that could be handled, transported, processed, and converted using existing corn and wheat logistics methods. Hammer mills took too much energy and made feedstocks that did not flow. BETO wanted someone to design systems to make two millimeter and six millimeter feedstocks with shapes optimized for biochemical and thermochemical conversion, were highly flowable, easily dried, and had the lowest possible carbon footprint. No incumbent combination technologies or commercial assistance could deliver on those needs. We accepted the challenge and that started a long collaborative relationship with DOE. Next slide.
By 2010 we understood enough that we could work with Pacific Northwest lab and Washington State University to start to understand how particle performance worked at the particle level. The geometry that we had at that point was roughly cubes to meet Sam Tagore's specs that he gave us of the ultimate flow ability, but PNNL asked a question of does really particle length matter? We all learned in sixth grade biology that water and nutrients are transported up and down plant stems and bile pipes. We also learned that other structural stuff on the outside of stalks and stems provided strength. Is this difference in structure across stem and across particle and the long particle, that was curious and suggested that in biomass conversion that not only did particle thickness matter but particle length should matter as long. So through a series of experiments and modeling, we found that there was a mass and energy balance when the mass or the particle with the thickness and with the length ratio was around three. So that allowed us to open up the specs and reduce the cost of manufacturing by producing particles that weren't perfect cubes but still had high flow ability and high conversion rate. Next slide.
The Forest Concepts Crumbler, or Rotary Shear depending upon how you see it published, is a little bit like a paper shredder on steroids but has a number of design features that are very specific to biomaterials. Cutter thickness, controls, particle size. Our standard sizes today are six millimeter, four millimeter, and two millimeter. The photo in the middle of this is our first commercial unit that was installed approximately four years ago in Tennessee. A smaller lab and pilot plant systems are in many locations today. Because a Crumbler is low speed, it can process biomass at any moisture content from dry to dripping wet, and the combination energy is very low, noise levels are low, and dust control is not needed in most materials above about 25 percent moisture content. Next slide.
The resulting feedstocks are very uniform, highly flowable, and appear to have higher conversion yields then feedstocks made by other milling systems. If you search the literature, you'll see an increasing number of Institutions who are citing the Forest Concepts Crumbles feedstocks or Rotary Sheared feedstocks in their materials and methods sections. And this apparent performance needed to be understood. So that's really the basis of the current project with NREL and INL. Now that we've been doing this at scale for 10 years, what can we learn that goes beyond what we learned in 2010 with our more empirical studies and models? Next slide.
NREL and INL today have X-ray tomography and supercomputer capabilities that enable characterization of surface and interior microstructures of biomass particles. And Jim showed a little bit about that in his presentation. In our 2010 work we were limited to gross particle morphology, microscopic examination of thin sections, and empirical experiments to inform assumptions and correlations. Peter Ciesielski at NREL has been working on how reaction kinetics relate to particle shape and structure, and now he's able to look at microstructure. Yidong Xia at INL has been working on flowability modeling and how particle shape and surface character relates to flow indicators like angle of repose. We at Forest Concepts provided each of them a matte set of conifer feedstocks to use in coordinated studies to look at this greatly increased level of detail. Next slide.
Remember that our basic assumption was that energy travels across particles, as shown in the orange arrow, and vapor or liquid mass exits the particles along the vascular structures shown by the green arrow. With new tomography and modeling tools we now know more. Next slide.
At a fine resolution we now know that pits and other pathways exist for mass transfer across particles. We also know that discontinuities and inclusions of lignin fiber bundles and other structural materials greatly affect energy conductance across the particles. It is not as simple as we presumed, even after our 2010 work, and now with the work that Peter and Yidong have been doing, we’re able to model reaction kinetics for Crumbles and other build biomass on a much more fundamental physical property basis. Next slide.
On the flowability modeling side, DOE BETO has been supporting development of advanced computational models for solving problems of feedstock handling throughout biomass supply chain. In particular, INL is applying discrete element methods that use particle morphology and surface character to predict how milled biomass will behave in Hopper's auger shoots and reactors. From the materials we provided and 3D models developed by NREL, the INL team can now refine their flowability models to better represent realistic materials and conditions. Forest Concepts is now in a position to help our clients and customers specify feedstocks and processing equipment based on a much better understanding of the effects of particle properties. We are using this new knowledge to refine our equipment designs and the specification we use in our toll processing operations. There are a number of publications issued in and work from the national labs that were making this information available to the broad industry and scientific engineering community. Next slide.
With that I'd like to thank you for your attention, remind you to post your questions and comments in the Q&A, and pass on to Kevin Barnett, who'll be the next speaker. Kevin?
Dr. Kevin Barnett , Pyran Co.
Thank-you, Jim. My name is Kevin Barnett. I'm the co-founder and CTO of Pyran. Next slide, please.
So just a brief overview of Pyran as a company before I go more into our technology and the great work the CCPC program did for us in assisting us in the scale-up of our technology. So as a high level, we're making five carbon renewable – five carbon products. So I'd like to think of this as filling the five carbon petrochemical gap. As you may know, there's a lot of even-number petrochemical products on the market today but not a lot of odd numbers, specifically five carbon. And if you're familiar with biomass, it does have a large five carbon feedstock in the hemicellulose fraction. So we're valorizing that to produce a lot of five carbon products to market. So we use a simple process with proven catalysts. This is all a thermocatalytic, which I'll get more into the technology later. And we have demonstrated 20 to 40 percent lower production costs than petrochemical processes to five carbon products, which are more difficult to make given the even-number feedstock. We're addressing a large market, filling the five carbon gap of about $65 billion, going into primarily paints and coatings, but then also nylons and other high-value markets. We are currently, as I'll get into, the main kind of crux of what we did with the CCPC program, is scaling our technology in a pilot demonstration unit. So part of that is making several tons of product to send to our customers for validation. But of course, what I'll get more to in this talk is the technology side and how we validated our technology, scaling up by about a thousand times. And lastly cradle-to-gate greenhouse gas emissions of 95 percent lower than traditional petrochemicals, such as 1,6 hexane dial. So obviously a big environmental impact of what we're trying to do at Pyran. Next slide, please.
There's a very high-level overview of our first product, which is 1,5 pentanediol. We are basically substituting petroleum-based 1,6 hexanediol and 1,5 pentanediol. So it's the same exact molecule but we're using the biomass feedstock versus the petroleum feedstock. And we have found a route that is both renewable and lower costs. And as I mentioned these are going into things like adhesives, coatings, and paints with a few different – a wide variety of applications. Next slide, please.
So getting more into the technology, this is our block flow diagram of our four-step catalytic process, starting with biomass furfural, which is the largest five carbon platform molecule on the market today, starting with hydrogenation to tetrahydrofurfuryl alcohol, then dehydration to dihydropyran, hydration to 2-hydroxytetrahydropyran, and finally hydrogenation at 1,5 pentanediol. We achieve over 85 percent yield to 1,5 pentanediol starting from furfural, and each of these steps that have been demonstrated in continuous flow reactors with readily available catalysts. As I mentioned this is all traditional heterogeneous thermocatalytic upgrading. So I really appreciated the overview Jim Parks gave earlier; I thought that was a great overview of exactly the type of reactors we're using. So you can picture a downflow flow reactor packed with heterogeneous pellet catalyst as he showed in that great demonstration in his presentation. So what we're doing with the CCPC program, while they're fairly traditional reactor types, downflow reactors, of course each of these reaction steps has different intricacies that require the expertise of modelers like those from the CCPC program to scale up by the several thousand times that we are doing from the laboratory to commercial scale. Some of these reactions have hydrogen. Some of them are liquid phase or three-phase reactions. The one that we focused on the most in the CCPC program is the second one, tetrahydrofurfuryl alcohol or THFA, dehydration to dihydropyran, which is a vapor phase reaction over a metal oxide catalyst. And so the CCPC modelers, they really guided our technology as we went into this 1,000 times scale-up. And they went through the thermodynamics. They did the kinetic modeling, and they taught us a lot as we were going into this, which assisted with the design of the pilot scale reactors and de-risked our scale-up by considerably. So it was a very useful process in the year leading up to our pilot program. Next slide, please.
So I guess this is mostly on greenhouse gas emissions. Honestly we already went through that enough, so we can go to the next slide. I'll get more into the technology.
So here's a picture of the pilot scale plant that we demonstrated this tetrahydrofurfuryl alcohol dehydration reaction. And you can see there's a vaporizer vaporizing the feed into the vapor phase, and then a six parallel downflow reactors that are six-inch diameter. So again, about a thousand times larger than the laboratory. So basically as Jim Parks showed earlier, the CCPC modelers, Bruce Adkins and Canan Karakaya, they did intraparticle, mass transfer, heat transfer, and then they guided the design of these reactors. And then moving on to the outcome, we can go to the next slide.
This is a picture of the team including myself, and in the middle Bruce Adkins, who actually went to the site before we started up to observe the reactor setup, which guided his modeling. It was basically a successful pilot program where we were able to produce several tons of our product on the specification that we thought, with the assistance of the modeling work that the CCPC program did. This graph on the right shows the model. I think they did 30 different models, so it was quite a lot of work moving towards the final model, but you can see the results were in line with expectations. Of course, there were a lot of learnings, as when you scale up this much, it's not going to always go exactly like you think. But the model was very close. And then after this program, we continued to update the model to better fit the pilot scale of data. And we're going to use that model now to design our commercial scalar reactors, which is the next phase of the company. So we're excited to keep working with the CCPC team to guide our scale-up from here on. Next slide.
And you know, just talking about next steps, now that we've completed this pilot campaign and we've updated our model that the CCPC program helped us develop, we're now scaling up to commercial scale with our pentanediol product. So we're looking forward to continue working with them on that, and we're also looking into additional five carbon chemistries. As I mentioned in the first slide, we're making a suite of five carbon products. So we're also excited to continue to collaborate with the DOE on bringing additional five carbon renewable products to market. So I think that's all I had. Next slide.
Again, here's my contact information. If you have any questions on the CCPC program or Pyran, I'd be happy to answer them. Please reach out to my email or our website. With that, I'll hand it off to Joaquín at Catalyxx. Thank you.
Joaquín Alarcón, Catalyxx, Inc.
Thank you, Kevin. Well, thank you, the BETO office, for putting together this webinar. I think it's very important for us to show how modeling can help for scaling up complex processes. So let me give you a snapshot of what we do. Next, please.
So Catalyxx was incorporated in 2017, and it's a renewable chemical and fuel technology company that has fully developed and successfully tested a new technology to produce n-biobutanol and longer-chain linear alcohols. Butanol is produced by condensation of ethanol, which means that molecules of ethanol get together to produce one molecular butanol and one molecule of water. And this is the, you know, following the mechanisms of the Guerbet’s reaction. This technology uses a patented catalyst. And it is a thermochemical catalytic process. The value that we bring with this technology is that we can reduce the cost of production of butanol by 60 percent than the petrochemical route, and we can lower the CO2 emissions up to 85 percent depending on the feedstock or origin of the ethanol. For those that are not familiar with the N-butanol market, N-butanol is intermediate chemical that has a market of approximately five billion dollars and is expected to grow steadily in the coming years. The technology is protected by five International farming sub patents. Next, please.
So N-butanol today is produced by what's called the Oxo process, where basically propylene and syngas react in a heterogeneous reactor to produce N-butanol and sometimes also other type of alcohols. In our case we use ethanol as feedstock. Ethanol can come from any source, whether it's corn, sugar cane, biomass, CO2, whatever. So we are feedstock agnostic. That ethanol goes through our catalytic process to produce N-butanol. And then N-butanol is used for coatings and paints, plasticizers, solvents, cleaning products, adhesives, and caulks. You name it. There’s a lot of the different uses for this product. Next, please.
So when we started with Oak Ridge National Lab in this project, we came with a backpack of data that was produced at large scale and pilot plant. And we were targeting the possibility of [inaudible] modeling to kind of look at what was industrial size – industrial scale reactor behavior. Initially we target a small reactor, but then, you know, as we progressed through the project, we decided to go further. And the objective was to look at the behavior of our five tons of catalyst reaction. So the team developed the model. We have been using the Console as a tool for modeling. And what I'm gonna present now is what we, you know, from where we started and what we have achieved. So next, please.
Initially we provided the kinetic model. The kinetic model was redefined and upgraded. We had more than 20 different model reactions, and it was an essential tool for scale-up. Without the connecting model it's completely possible to – scaling up a process. The other thing was we look at thermodynamics of the reaction. And we started looking at the particle, so looking at the reaction mechanisms, looking at the exothermicity of the reaction, and looking at it, was any type of restrictions for a heat transfer. And also from mass transfer. When we had a clear picture of what was the results at the particle level, we went to the pellet level and did the same thing. So, we look at how that pellet behaved, and with that pellet we then built the industrial-sized reactor holding the thousands and thousands of these pellets. And we're able to get the final and calculate the heat generation, the heat transfer effects, and how are the reaction would behave in this larger reactor. We also verified the operating conditions, temperature pressure, space velocity, and the Oak Ridge National Lab team suggested that we could work with lower concentrations of hydrogen, which is always a plus. Then we defined a battery of experiments to check the results of the computational model. And basically the results that we got with experiments proved the model. So we were very happy because the behavior of the reaction in the real setting was very, very close to what the model predicted. And with this new experiment, the team suggested a turn-up of temperature, pressure, and space velocity. The other thing that we look at was the pellet size and the shape, and the result of the model were consistent with the actual pellets that we have for the catalysts and for this pilot scale. Next, please.
So the final objective, as I said, it was what happened, what would happen in a five-ton reactor. So although we still need to work more on this and provide more real data from the demonstrator plant that we have built, we have determined that the behavior of the five-ton reactor is going to be very, very close to the 12-kilos reactor that we are using in the demonstrator plan. So, this is all something that we're looking at. So can we rely on the experimental data that we have obtained in the smaller scales? Would the five-ton reactor behave in the same manner that the other scales did? And the answer is yes. We think that from this modeling that we have done, we feel very comfortable scaling up the size of the reactor and going commercial. Next, please.
So I’d just like to thank you, the Oak Ridge National Lab, and the BETO office for supporting this project. I think it's been tremendously helpful for Catalyxx. And now I would like to let the people ask the questions, and you know, happy to answer those. Thank-you very much.
All right, thank-you, thank-you, Joaquin. I appreciate it. And thank-you all for some great presentations on the research and development happening at the Consortium for Computational Physics and Chemistry. Also, thanks to Dr. Dooley for reminding us that today is Bioenergy Day. I appreciate that. OK, let's get right to the questions. I think this one is for Dr. Parks at Oak Ridge: I'd like to know if CCPC has an open-source software for modeling these bioenergy processes, perhaps a software accessible to individual researchers who are also interested in these studies.
Dr. Jim Parks
Yeah, that's a great question. We do; we actually have a GitHub site where some of our code has been made available to run on open software codes like Python, for instance. And the Impex software is also open-source code, and so that's available as well. So, we actually use a mix of different software codes depending on the application, so in some cases we might use a commercial software, like some of the work presented today was actually done using Console. And we have our own specific codes that we develop, and then we have some codes that we develop in an open-source platform. When possible we do try to upload things to our GitHub site to enable others to use it, but we also highly encourage people to reach out to us and our researchers so that there could be a good tech transfer of those modeling capabilities. But we're happy to provide the code to be publicly usable and an open-source platforms when possible.
Justin Rickard
Looks like Peter Ciesielski jumped in on the chat, said that the Mezzo flow code was also released as open source this year. And those – those GitHub links can be found on the CCPC website, Jim?
Dr. Jim Parks
Yes.
Justin Rickard
And that is energy.gov/CCPC. All right, let's see, another question; this one is for Dr. Barnett at Pyran: Is the feedstock for the Pyran process corn only or cellulosic biomass?
Dr. Kevin Barnett
Both. It's furfural, which can be made from corn cobs. It is all cellulosic, so it's all the non-edible portion. But you can find the hemicellulose in things like corn cobs, wood, and sugarcane.
Justin Rickard
All right, all right, thank-you. Let's see here. A question: What are the remaining challenges to move the technologies you are working on to commercialization? That's probably for everybody?
Dr. Kevin Barnett
Well, I can start. This demonstration scale that we did with the CCPC program was a huge derisking step as we demonstrated the technology and equipment – while we weren't making commercial scale volumes, we were demonstrating an equipment that was within the range of commercial scales as far as reactor dimensions to where the scale-up from here on is much derisked. So now it's about design of the commercial plant using the data we collected, and of course siting and then building that plant. So I can hand it over to someone else.
Dr. James Dooley
Jim Dooley, Forest Concepts. You know, the project that we did with Peter and Yidong focused on wood as the primary biomass material. And when we moved to our basis crops, wheat, straw, corn stover, [inaudible] hemp, whatever, there needs to be similar exploration about microstructure and flowability and stuff. So expanding that base, and with us at Forest Concepts, we actually have another DFO with Oak Ridge looking at expanding the commercialization of the Crumbler technology. And we're addressing doubling, tripling, quadrupling the wear life of the wear components in that system, and that may be subject of another DFO presentation sometime.
Joaquín Alarcón
Yeah, I would also say that for us, looking at how the model works in a larger scale gives us a tremendous value to assess the energy that we would need to provide or the energy that we need to remove from the reactor. And also we can forecast what would be the conversion rates and the [inaudible] so we can design properly then demonstrate processes. So I think that you obviously – you start from a straight-up plan where you have everything there, but it's a skill that is enough to solve a lot of questions. But according to commercial and multiplying 10 times this size of the reactor without going through the kind of demonstration plant, you know, medium-sized industrial setting is a challenge. And doing that – yes, yeah, with the plan is very risky. So when we had the model we can gather a lot of good information and trying to use the data into market.
Dr. Jim Parks
I'll add one other thing that kind of falls in line with what Joaquin and Kevin and Jim talked about in terms of the challenges. Obviously we're working a lot on in terms of enabling the scale-up of these technologies. That's a big step. And you're seeing the progress that's being made by these companies in those areas. But another thing that comes into play as we mentioned is feedstocks. And I just wanted to mention more broadly in in the Bioenergy Technologies Office as you scale up you're going to need more feedstocks. And the variability of those feedstocks feeding your process might increase due to that. There's already a lot of natural variability in biomass, because it is a natural feedstock. And then we're looking at other low-cost feedstocks like municipal solid waste and other, which has other challenges. So just in terms of the bioenergy, helping address some of the challenges that are forthcoming with the scale-up of technologies in the bioenergy area, there is a lot of focus in the research program supported by the Bioenergy Technologies Office to how the feedstocks and the variability of those feedstocks will translate through these processes as they scale up. And that's really important because there's a vast array of different feedstocks we can utilize, but we need to understand how to utilize them most effectively for these processes.
Justin Rickard
All right, thank you. Thank you, everybody, for that. Looks like we just got another question in: And have you done techno-economic analysis on how your products compare to fossil-based products?
Joaquín Alarcón
Yes, in the case of Catalyxx, absolutely yes, we've done that. So that's why we can say that, so we can reduce production up to 60 percent over comparable petrochemical base products.
Dr. Kevin Barnett
Likewise, that's pretty much the whole premise of Pyran, is our cost advantage and greenhouse gas advantage to petrochemicals. So we're continually updating our technoeconomic analyzes compared to the petroleum-based products as we scale.
Dr. James Dooley
At Forest Concepts, since we're in the upstream feedstock supply to these guys, we continuously monitor energy consumption, carbon footprint yields, to minimize the LCA impacts downstream, since it all carries forward into the processes of Kevin and Joaquin.
Justin Rickard
Awesome. Looks like we just have about two minutes left. This is probably for the panel: What do you appreciate most about the Bioenergy Technologies Office Consortium here, CCPC?
Dr. James Dooley
Jim Dooley. You know, we're successful as a small company by surrounding ourselves with really smart people who know a lot of stuff that adds as teaming. And I think the key to success is that everybody at the labs and BETO staff at Golden, CO and in Washington, D.C., clearly approach every conversation as a team member and we clearly appreciate that.
Dr. Kevin Barnett
I couldn't have said it better myself, so I'll leave it at that.
Joaquín Alarcón
Well, I think the people that work with us are very smart; they deploy the wealth of knowledge and very good ideas. And you know, working with the BETO office is fantastic because it also provides capability to our solutions, having people that trust what we do and that have an excellent profile and excellent background is very encouraging for us. So we can just at least for myself, yes, can say thank you, thank you, thank you.
Justin Rickard
All right, all right, it looks like we're just about out of time. Thanks to Dr. Parks, Dr. Dooley, Dr. Barnett, and Mr. Alarcón for taking time out of your busy schedules to educate us today on the fantastic research and development happening at the Consortium for Computational Physics and Chemistry. If you didn't get your question answered, you are welcome to send them to the BETO email address listed near the top of the slide. For more bioenergy webinars like this and other BETO-funded research, please sign up at the BETO newsletters page at the link at the bottom of this slide. And the webinar recording and slides will be posted on the BETO Webinars webpage in a couple of weeks and communicated by BETO. All right, thanks, everyone, and have a great rest of your day.