Danish enzyme producer Novozymes has launched a new product for bioethanol extraction from plant waste claiming that "second-generation" biofuels will now be able to compete with gasoline on price.
Novozymes, the world's biggest producer of industrial enzymes, unveiled its new Cellic CTec2 enzyme at an ethanol conference in Florida and said the production costs of fuel made with it could be less than $2 per gallon.
"To get costs down to this level, you need industrial-scale production, anywhere from 10 million gallons and upward," Poul Ruben Andersen, Novozymes marketing director for biofuels, told Reuters in a telephone interview on the eve of the launch.
Costs at that level would be on par with costs of producing gasoline and conventional ethanol at current U.S. market prices, Novozymes said in a statement.
Enzyme costs are now down to about $0.50 per gallon of cellulosic ethanol, Novozymes said. "The 50 cents is what we can sell at today if you take state-of-the-art technology and apply it to a large-scale plant," Andersen said. "If you take best in class, you can get down to 50 cents."
The product launch came a day after rival Danisco, another Danish firm, launched its enzyme for second-generation fuel product at the same trade fair.
The two Danish companies, which already sell enzymes for first-generation biofuels made from food crops, hope second-generation bioethanol production will take off in the next few years and boost demand for enzymes.
COMMERCIAL PRODUCTION
Enzymes are used to break down the starch in food crops and -- in the case of second-generation biofuels -- the cellulose in wastes such as straw, corn cobs and stalks, sugarcane bagasse, wood chips or non-food crops like switchgrass.
"Generally we can get most cellulosic feedstocks to work, though each substrate is slightly different and it depends on the pretreatment," Andersen said.
Commercial production of second-generation biofuels is still a year or two away though it is part of plans laid out earlier this month by U.S. President Barack Obama to promote clean energy and reduce America's dependence on foreign oil.
"Production this year and next year will be limited because it is not until the end of next year that the large-scale production plants will be up and running, so it is not until 2012 that we will see large volumes," Andersen said.
One industrial scale plant being built is privately owned Poet's 25-million-gallon-per-year cellulosic ethanol plant at Emmetsburg, Iowa, which it aims to start up next year with corn cobs as feedstock.
Other industrial-scale projects are Spanish engineering group Abengoa's plant at 16-million-gallon Hugoton, Kansas, and a similar-size Abengoa project in Lacq, France.
"These are the projects that are publicly known. We know of others based on confidential contacts," Andersen said.