Cobalt Innovations
Cobalt Technologies has assembled an industry-leading team of scientists, engineers, and visionaries who are shaping the future of renewable chemicals and fuels. These products will be based on the use of renewable starting materials such as forestry and agricultural wastes and dedicated energy crops. These materials do not impact global food supply, and are not dependent upon petroleum.
Cobalt has taken a re-engineering approach to the tradition fermentation process for making butanol. The primary driver for Cobalt’s technology is reducing the cost of feedstock and minimizing the capital cost for fermentation. Sugars derived from food products, such as corn and sugar cane, are prohibitively expensive for the production of chemicals and fuels. Therefore, Cobalt has focused on the use of low cost cellulosic biomass such as forestry wastes and biomass process extracts as raw materials for butanol production as a starting point. There are abundant sources of these materials available today to supply the n-butanol market globally, and to make significant headway supplying related chemical derivatives markets.
Several technological innovations combined with low cost feedstock have advanced the process to be economically advantaged to petroleum-derived butanol and derivatives, including:
Biomass Sugar Extraction
To convert the carbohydrates (cellulose and hemicellulose) in lignocellulosic biomass, Cobalt has developed a process that simultaneously extracts and converts the lignocellulosic materials into simple sugars. Cobalt’s approach integrates the extraction process with hydrolysis chemistry in a way that shortens residence time while maintaining mild conditions. Our approach enables the use of smaller vessels and less expensive metallurgy, thereby minimizing capital and operating costs.
Cobalt’s approach is in contrast to the more commonly pursued, and significantly more expensive process of sulfuric acid extraction of hemicellulose followed by enzymatic hydyrolysis of cellulose to simple sugars.
Cobalt’s cutting-edge technology further improves the economics of biofuels by enabling production based on low-cost, stably-priced sources of non-food plant material. Cobalt production technologies are designed to process a broad range of feedstocks, reducing the risks associated with reliance on a single crop.
Microbial Strain Development
Cobalt’s technology is based on a bacterial fermentation of lignocellulosic sugars into butanol. Cobalt has developed proprietary bacterial strain development technology for improving the fermentation performance of a variety of microbial strains. These strains are specifically selected for their ability to utilize all five of the sugars found in plant materials. This innovative technology makes it possible to process a range of lignocellulosic biomass in the production of butanol.
Cobalt’s cutting-edge strain development technology has improved the economics of butanol production by increasing the rate, yield and concentration. Moreover, this technology has improved the resistance of the microorganism to the by-products of biomass conversion. Thus Cobalt’s production technologies are designed to process a broad range of feedstock at high rates and yields, reducing the risks associated with reliance on a single crop.
Fermentation Process
Cobalt’s fermentation process differs radically from the traditional batch processes used today to convert starch to alcohol fuel. Our technology poises our continuous fermentation process at peak production rates for extended periods of time using our innovative bioreactor technology. Continuous production increases the overall production time of the fermentation unit, reducing capital and operating costs.
The Cobalt continuous bioreactor system also dramatically increases production rate as much as 11-fold over traditional batch fermentation processes, substantially reducing capital costs. The result is a more capital efficient production process, with lower input costs, resulting in a more economic process.
Product Recovery
Historically, distillation has been used to purify butanol from petroleum and biological processes, an approach which is energy and capital intensive. Cobalt utilizes process and thermal integration to reduce costs. Cobalt’s distillation process for butanol recovery uses approximately half the energy and half the equipment services compared to conventional butanol distillation.