The tremendous growth of the biofuel industry has resulted in an oversupply of crude glycerol and a 10-fold decrease in prices over the past two years. At current prices glycerol is a very competitive raw substrate to produce added value products (chemicals, polymers and oils) via microbial fermentation. NEURON BPh is currently intent on developing these processes for different industrial applications.

 
An economically feasible lignocellulose-to-ethanol process needs to overcome two major hurdles:  biomass delignification and the fermentation of hydrolysates containing sugars (C6 and C5) and inhibitory compounds. At NEURON BPh we are working on developing “talented” strains to address such hurdles and develop an efficient bioethanol process.