Drawing on its advanced knowledge of biomass chemistry, Bloom Biorenewables has developed a technology that effectively separates the components of biomass. The company markets compounds used to manufacture solvents and polymers and is working on producing renewable fuels.
Remy Buser, co-founder and co-CEO of Bloom Biorenewables, has no doubt: the potential of biomass to replace hydrocarbons obtained from petroleum is vastly underestimated. Using its advanced knowledge of plant chemistry, the company has developed a unique and promising technology that can separate all the components of plants effectively. We have long been able to isolate the cellulose from plants (which accounts for around 40% of their total weight), but up to now the rest of the plant has been discarded or burned. Faced with an urgent need to obtain more renewable carbon compounds, this spin-off of EPFL, the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, has developed technology capable of extracting the other biomass components, namely lignin and hemicellulose, without damaging them.
Bloom Biorenewables has registered six families of patents to protect the processes it has developed, the chemical structures it uses and their final applications. “The added value lies in the organic refining process,” adds Remy Buser. The resulting compounds can be used to make solvents and polymers, replacing petroleum-based products. The company is currently marketing these compounds to the perfume industry (including the Swiss giant DSM-Firmenich), chemicals companies and the construction sector. In February 2021, Bloom Biorenewables received its first financial backing from Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures Europe fund.
Production has begun at a pilot plant on a big enough scale to test the markets, in partnership with the Fribourg school of engineering and architecture (HEIA-FR). The company is set to raise enough capital to build its own production plant and plans to be converting around 1,000 tonnes of biomass per year by 2025.
By 2030, Bloom Biorenewables aims to have formed a joint venture with an industrial company so that it can build a production site capable of converting 80,000 tonnes of biomass annually. In the longer term, the company has ambitions to commercially produce renewable fuels for the aviation and maritime transport sectors. “We are starting by securing smaller markets where we can make bigger margins, but our vision is to offer solutions that will reduce carbon emissions (CO2) on an international scale,” say co-CEOs Florent Héroguel and Remy Buser. “And we can’t do that until we’re dealing with extremely large volumes.”
