Bill Gates invests 14 million dollars in industrial process for manufacturing plastic through biomass

Days before the United Nations climate change talks leading up to the Paris Agreement, Bill Gates has brought together 28 major investors to form the so-called Breakthrough Energy Coalition and pledged to invest in low-carbon innovation.

While little is known about what investments have already been made, Renmatix announced today a $14 million investment from the billionaire Microsoft co-founder. The startup has developed a pioneering process for turning biomass into cellulosic sugars that can be used in place of petroleum-based polymers in a variety of industrial processes.

Renmatix said the investment allows a company to begin taking its patented scientific process from the lab scale to commercial use – precisely the stage in the innovation cycle that Gates says needs capital. The process developed, called Plantrose, uses high pressure and high temperature water to convert biomass into cellulosic sugar, which is an intermediate material that can, through processes, be transformed into plastic materials ranging from cups and cell phone parts to industrial adhesives. A process with renewable energy on the industrial basis, changing the way plastic materials are manufactured, and may attract the attention of large investors.

However, it has not yet been possible to confirm that the investment is related to the Breakthrough Energy Coalition, launched in December with supporters such as Mark Zuckerberg, Richard Banson, Marc Benioff, Meg Whitman and Tom Steyer.

Almost as significant as Gates' investment is the group's second largest investor, the French energy company Total, which we delivered on licensing the Plantrose process to produce 1 million tons of cellulosic sugar per year at its facilities. The licensing agreement is in the early stages of development, and is expected to go through the engineering phase in 2017, followed by commercial scale.

“Plantrose is a disruptive process because it means increasingly lower costs for converting biofuels into sugars – this helps bring biofuels to cost parity with petroleum-based polymers and industrial chemicals,” says Hamilton.

Biofuels have faded from the renewables landscape in recent years, while solar and wind power have been increasingly popular. This is partly due to the low cost of oil prices over the past two years, which has made biofuels relatively more expensive. Oil is currently sold between $43 and $46 per barrel, while it reached a low of $33.28 this year.

“The new process appears to be a major step forward in reducing dependence on oil at the base of the production chain,” says André De Dominicis, an expert in industrial efficiency. “It remains to be seen whether it consumes less energy than the conventional process.”

Source: GreenBiz

[1] “Supercritical” state is a scientific term. It means that a substance is under conditions of temperature and pressure above its critical point, where the liquid and gaseous states are indistinguishable.