€100M scale-up bioprocess plant be built at TU Delft

The European Regional Development Fund, the Dutch Ministries of Agriculture and Economic Affairs, and the municipalities of Rotterdam, Delft and The Hague, research institutions and companies are to jointly invest over €100 million in a pilot facility in Delft for piloting industrial scale-up of novel bioprocesses for producing energy from biomass.

Companies and research institutions from around the world will be able to use the facility.

The project will be managed by BE-Basic, a consortium of universities, research institutions and industry, led by TU Delft.

The Bioprocess Pilot Facility will make it possible to identify and resolve problems that are not evident at laboratory scale. The Delft test facility will be the first of its kind in the world, both in its scale and in making the facility open to all-comers.

The facility will consist of a number of separate modules, where different methods of pre-treatment of biomass, fermentation, downstream processing and purification, can be tested. This will make it flexible and suitable for use by a wide variety of industries. The facility will also be a centre of excellence where students, researchers and technologists can be trained.

For more information about the Bioprocess Pilot Facility, contact Luuk van der Wielen, Director-BE Basis, [email protected], or visit the website at http://www.be-basic.org