The Digest’s Top 10 Celluosic Project flashpoints, 10 Quick Takes

#9 Unorthodox antioxidant focus drives Stover Ventures towards cellulosic dream

A remarkable and usually under the radar company known as Stover Ventures is said to be nearing its once-unliekly goal of raising capital — mostly so far from Iowa farmers — to construct a biorefinery near Osage, Iowa which will convert up to 14,400 tons per year of corn stover into a neutraceutical extract and a treated animal feed which tests are showing has a 71% higher digestability rating than a standard control feed in a University of Wisconsin trial.
But its the antioxidant product that drives the economics. The Stover Ventures team projects a 3 percent yield from corn stover and a value of $35 per kilogram for the extract. Combined with a $125 value for the remainder of the stover for its animal feed value, the overall ton of corn stover drives a value of $1,077 per ton.Cellulosic ethanol, by contrast, produces somewhere in the range of $300-$450 per ton after all carbon credits are added in for the high-value California market, in the yield range that most technologies produce. So, think double or even triple the revenue for cellulosic ethanol and you have the Stover Ventures proposal in a nutshell. And though the antioxidant market is much smaller than the fuels market, it runs over $4B these days and is growing at 6-8 percent per year.
According to Stover, the extract is by composition 1/3 polyphenols, 1/3 simers of polyphenols and the remainder is a combination of organic acids including p-coumaric, ferulic and sinapinic. The extract is said to have a top quartile performance in terms of “Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity.” also known as ORAC, , which examines he standard measure for anti-oxidant quality. And the team says that the extract is “effective on human cells” according to a CAP-e assay which examines cell-based antioxidant protection in red blood cells.
More on the story, here.