TMO has developed a cellulosic ethanol process based around its proprietary thermophilic ethanologen (TM242) which reduces the major barriers to commercialization and delivers an economically viable process.  This fully integrated and highly automated process has been running successfully in TMO’s 1.4 MGPY Process Demonstration Unit (PDU) for more than 18 months. The main process features will be illustrated with representative data from our lab, pilot and demonstration scale.

The TMO process  operates at high dry solids, using a robust and scalable pretreatment technology that does not require acid or base catalysis. This pretreatment  step, which begins the process of sugar solubilisation, is relatively mild and generates a fermentable process stream containing very low levels of inhibitors. The process of solubilising the biomass sugars is completed in the hydrolysis step with the addition of low loadings of enzymes. We will illustrate how our approach to understanding the essential enzyme activities required to deconstruct biomass feedstocks, together with our screening of activities contained in a diverse range of commercially available enzymes, has allowed us to define a minimal enzyme set and reduce overall enzyme costs by an order of magnitude. Finally, the product of the hydrolysis step is a process stream rich in both polymeric and monomeric  C5 and C6 sugars which TM242 can efficiently convert to ethanol delivering high productivities on a wide range of biomass feedstocks. This will be illustrated using a corn fibre feedstock where productivities of 85 USG/T have been achieved.