France’s ARD opens new premises and touts ‘a new dynamic’
In France, ARD is inaugurating its new premises, just a few hundred meters away, at the center of what has since become the biorefinery of Bazancourt-Pomacle. The new building, the consortium partners say, represents the ambitions of a team of over 90 people dedicated to creating value from crops through industrial processes.
A research and development company located at the heart of the regional biorefinery of Pomacle-Bazancourt, France, and backed by the cooperative players VIVESCIA and CRISTAL UNION, ARD has two main activities. The first is the scaling up of processes from the laboratory stage to industrial demonstration stage in the fields of biorefining, industrial biotechnologies, and green chemistry.
ARD offers its services to start-ups and manufacturers, which benefit from the expertise developed by ARD over the last 20 years and its investments in laboratory equipment, pilots, and industrial demonstrations, and can thus speed up the time to market for products while optimizing costs and investments. ARD’s second activity is the maximization of its own research projects’ value through the creation of subsidiaries that market and industrialize new products, such as Wheatoleo for detergent and emulsifying ingredients. ARD successfully developed processes that led to the creation of industrial facilities such as Chamtor, Cristanol and Soliance in Pomacle-Bazancourt. ARD’s customers also include BioAmber, Amyris, and Global Bioenergies.
“They are very good at scale-up, as a whole, and all components of it. Their business is to scale up industrial biotech processes,” said Jean-François Rous of Avril. BioAmber added, “They are very good on the science and they demonstrate real curiosity to thoroughly understand the processes they are working on.” Franck Launay of IPSB noted, “ARD is clearly the French center that has the widest knowledge of unit operations such as separation, centrifugation, and fermentation, etc.”
Category: Fuels
