Value Prior to Pulping (VPP) is an effort of the US forest and paper products industry, with funding from the Department of Energy, state of Wisconsin and large forest products companies. It is seeking “cost-effective, high-yield processes to separate and extract selected components from wood prior to pulping, and to process the extracted components to produce commercially viable chemical and liquid fuel products.”

Verenium, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, plans to test its C5 technology for creating ethanol using the pulping by-product. The company’s cellulosic ethanol process currently uses an acid hydrolysis to remove hemicellulose from biomass and convert it to pentose sugars, which goes through several more steps to become ethanol.

“Integrating ethanol production into the pulping process could create an attractive market opportunity for Verenium and the pulping industry,” states Gregory Powers, Verenium’s executive vice president of research and development. “If this project proves successful, Verenium will be well positioned to enable this new source of low-cost biofuels.”

Adds Verenium chief executive Carlos Riva: “We believe these types of opportunities to ‘bolt’ our technology onto existing industrial processes, where the feedstock sourcing, handling and processing are already well-established, and are complementary to our core biofuels strategy.”

The forest products industry, through an effort called Agenda 2020, is exploring ways to increase revenue and use waste products from sawmills, pulp mills and paper mills. An ‘integrated forest products biorefinery’ is described in this PDF published by the group.

Verenium says a typical kraft process paper mill could produce 15 million gallons (56.8 million litres) of ethanol using hemicelluloses annually.

CleanTech Partners is a non-profit Wisconsin investment outfit funded by grants from Focus on Energy, a Wisconsin utility programme.