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Questions

1. What is the "Carbohydrate Economy"?
2. Besides ethanol, what other products can be produced via the Arkenol process?
3. What co-products are produced by the Arkenol process?

Answers

What is the "Carbohydrate Economy"?

One hundred years ago most of our fuels, construction materials, clothes, inks, paints, and even synthetic fibers and chemicals were made from plant matter. Then petroleum flooded the economy and a new industrial era began. By the 1980s less than 5 percent of our industrial products and fuels came from biological materials.

However, new technologies, new laws, and increasingly environmentally aware public are ushering in a new materials base for the 21st century; plant matter. We call it a "carbohydrate economy".

The environmental benefits of a carbohydrate economy are significant. Bio-based chemicals generate a tiny fraction of the pollution generated by the manufacture and use of petrochemicals. The use of biological fuels generates far less carbon dioxide than the use of fossil fuels. Finding commercial uses for the 300 million tons of cellulosic waste generated annually in our rural and urban areas would itself achieve important reductions in pollution. Switching to grasses or crops for making paper and construction materials would allow us to preserve old growth forests.

The carbohydrate economy promises economic as well as environmental benefits. Thousands of locally owned biorefineries that make multiple products from a single biological feedstock could inject billions of dollars into rural economies. The knowledge generated from this new manufacturing sector could become an important export.

The Institute for Local Self Reliance (contact David Morris - V.P.) has published numerous monographs and papers on the subject of the "Carbohydrate Economy" and may be contacted through its Web site [www.ilsr.org] for additional information.

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Besides ethanol, what other products can be produced via the Arkenol process?

The Arkenol process extracts and converts cellulose and hemicellulose to C6 and C5 sugars. In a 1978 article published in Science, DuPont provided a review of over 250 chemicals that are manufactured today from petroleum and were once manufactured from sugar. Many of these are niche chemicals with small markets and high barriers to entry. The others are comprised of commodities whose manufacturing costs are optimized by the economies of scale found in the mega-refineries of the world. In order to compete in today's market place with these petroleum-derived commodity chemicals, it is critical to begin with significantly lower feedstock costs. The Arkenol process provides this cheaper sugar feedstock, and because of its geographic flexibility, can be sited near its ultimate customers to permit lower transportation costs.

In additional to ethanol, there are other commodity chemicals in wide use whose markets can assist to springboard the Carbohydrate Economy. These can be divided into three general classes of chemicals: organic acids (e.g., citric acid, levulinic acid, acetic acid, oxalic acid), solvents (e.g., butanol, acetone, isopropanol, ethanol, furfural), and other chemicals (e.g., n-butyl butyrate, acetates, butanediols)

For a discussion of market sizes, see the web site managed by the ILSR at www.ilsr.org.

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What co-products are produced by the Arkenol process?

Aside from the primary fermentation products, the Arkenol process produces gypsum (calcium sulfate) and lignin in marketable quantities. Gypsum has markets in industry (e.g. road base, wallboard) and in agriculture (e.g., soil conditioner). Lignin also has markets in industry and in agriculture. Lignin may be used as a low-sulfur, cleaner-burning solid fuel with a higher heating value that ranges about 8,000 Btu/lb. As a soil amendment, lignin contains the minerals and nutrients that were originally extracted from the soil through the metabolism of plants. Its consistency is like peat moss, and in large scale agricultural applications, may be returned to the soil using conventional manure spreading equipment.

Because the Arkenol process recovers and recycles over 95% of the sulfuric acid used in the decrystallization and hydrolysis of cellulose, the amount of gypsum produced is significantly lower than older, less advanced processes.

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