Applying RaBIT process in converting corn fiber to ethanol in existing corn ethanol industry

About 220 first generation corn ethanol plants are operating in US that produce fuel ethanol (about 13.9 billion U.S. liquid gallons in 2011) using starch. Ethanol production was expected to continue to grow over the next several years, since the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 required 36 billion US gallons of renewable fuel use by 2022. Due to limited availability of corn grains in US, we could see a slowdown in building new corn ethanol processing plants. However, the existing plant owners are motivated to improve the efficiency of corn ethanol processing with limited investment. The cellulosic component of corn (corn fiber) called dry distiller grain (DDG) after processing is sold as animal feed in the market.  Our technology, RaBIT (Rapid Bioconversion with Integrated Recycle Technology), greatly enhances biofuel productivity and reduces capital costs by shortening the pretreated biomass conversion time from the conventional 7-10 days to only 2 days. Corn wet cake will be processed without pretreatment using RaBIT and the resulting sugars stream will be used as liquid media for hydrolysis of incoming corn starch to improve the efficiency of corn ethanol plant by producing coproduct like protein and coil oil.  Valicor Inc. (Dexter, MI) has sold and continue to service about 50 corn ethanol plants with their COSS™ system for centrifugal separation of corn oil from thin stillage. Valicor has an active R&D program to further utilize stillage for enhanced corn oil extraction, recovery of protein rich animal feeds, and fiber derived co-products.