RE: From Weekend Vancouver SunThat article dated March 17, 2011 is quite the informative article outling the necessary steps needed to make Lignol successful.
Aside from the funding risks which should be taken care of by continued funding later in the year by the US Government, there is still the technological risk of finding a cheap biofuel alternative to the cheaper grains, which needs to be done as we need grains for human consumption.
There are still some obstacles to overcome for LEC as there are competitors using algae to produce ethanol at a cheaper cost than cellulosic ethanol from biomass, but hopefully with the added value of the resin adhesive it will make the ethanol cheaper to produce for LEC.
I believe that ethanol is still the higher demand product, so it is crucial that LEC makes the best of the resin adhesive or find further advancements to their technology to bring the costs of producing the ethanol down. Looks like they are on their way, and long term this could very well be a huge success.
This is not a short term play. atb
Scotia Capital suggested that, at the present time, projects researching the production of ethanol from algae have an advantage over cellulosic ethanol. Lignol hopes to change that.
“We need to produce either an ethanol cost-effectively or we are going to need to effectively produce a chemical, such as lignin, that can hit and meet the specifications for an industrial application,” MacLachlan said.
“What we’ve done at Lignol is say, ‘What we are going to really do is try to get the most value we can out of that biomass, and recognizing that the value of fuel will always be trumped by the value of chemicals, we have decided to focus more on increasing the value of the chemical first, as the primary outlet — in this particular case derivatives of lignin.”