Aphios Corporation

Biomass resources are currently greatly underutilized in the United States and countries around the world. If effectively exploited, these resources can reduce our dependency on foreign oil while alleviating several environmental problems.

Forests are prime candidates for improvement in biomass utilization. In the harvesting of a tree, approximately 40% of the biomass is either burned or treated as a waste problem. This waste biomass can be utilized as the feedstock for fermentation processes that could produce ethanol, industrial chemicals and ruminants for animal feed. Ethanol production from plant substrates requires the development of an efficient pretreatment process for increasing the susceptibility of woody biomass to hydrolytic enzymes. Pretreated biomass substrates can then be hydrolyzed to glucose and converted to ethanol by conventional yeast fermentation. Biomass produced ethanol can displace gasoline usage, thereby reducing oil consumption while lowering air pollution.

Aphios has developed an improved biomass pretreatment process [the CFC process] that has the combined capability to defibrate biomass at low operating temperatures and fractionate wood into its constituents. We have demonstrated that the CFC process is technically feasible with several advantages over conventional steam explosion pretreatment. These conclusions are based on: (1) high enzymatic conversion efficiencies to ethanol (CFC was 60% more effective than steam explosion in pretreating white pine, 300% better in pretreating newsprint and just as effective in pretreating red oak): (2) biomass recovery yields were much higher with CFC (between 95% and 99%) than steam explosion (often less than 80%); (3) operating conditions of temperature and time were lower for CFC than for steam explosion.