Europe Injects €5.9m into Biofuel Development Project

decrease font size

increase font size

change type face

bookmark this page

email this page

print this page

Global Bioenergy Industry News

Thursday, August 27, 2009

Print This Page

Europe Injects €5.9m into Biofuel Development Project

EU - The European Union (EU) recently invested €5.9m into a project, NEMO, to develop manufacturing methods for liquid biofuel from agricultural and forestry waste.

The project is being headed up by Finland's VTT Technical Research Centre and brings together European research institutes and companies to develop the next generation of biofuel.

The NEMO project (Novel high performance enzymes and micro-organisms for conversion of lignocellulosic biomass to bioethanol) will last four years. It will develop enzymes that can be used to cut lignocellulose into sugar compounds suitable for fermentation. The objective is also to tailor the metabolism of microbes so that they can produce large volumes of ethanol out of the biomass sugars economically and efficiently. The project evaluates the suitability of the developed enzymes and yeast strains for industrial biofuel manufacturing processes.

According to the project coordinator Merja Penttilä, Research Professor at VTT, yeasts are excellent production organisms, suitable for large scale industrial production. Using enzymes, sugars can be released gently from the lignocellulose so that the sugar solution is not too toxic to microbes.

The total costs of the four-year NEMO project amount to €8.2 million, reports Biofuel Review.

TheBioenergySite News Desk