GreenProtein General Assembly & DEMO Plant Part 1

Oct 3, 2019GreenProtein Activity0 comments

The GreenProtein General Assembly and the Grand Opening of the GreenProtein DEMO plant will take place the 9th and 10th of October 2019. These are two significant events for the project and a big occasion to celebrate and share our progress.

What is exactly going to happen in them and why are they important for the project?

The GreenProtein General Assembly

All Greenprotein project partners are getting together the 9th of October for the Project General Assembly. The host of the event will be Cosun, project coordinator, and its goal will be to discuss the progress so far as well as to establish the strategy for the next year of the project.

Grand Opening of the GreenProtein DEMO Plant

The Greenprotein project proposal states:

“GreenProtein aims at a major innovation by producing high-added value, food-grade and fully functional proteins and other ingredients, out of vegetal residues mainly from sugar beet.The main outcome will be the valorisation of 4,000 tons of agricultural residue /yearly into a high quality dried RuBisCo powder ready to enter into food industry production chains as an alternative of the widely extended egg white preparations or whey protein

In order to achive this goal, many small steps need to be taken. A team of experienced and qualified professionals with background in different fields (scientific research, technical development, scale-up, process efficiency, sustainability, market research…) gets together, tasks are approached one by one and only very slowly results start to come out.

One important milestone in this process was to: “design and implement specific equipment to establish a demonstration plant with capacity of 1,500 kg/hour of vegetable residue input, rendering 28 Kg of dry RuBisCO.” DEMO plants are a major step for innovative projects like GreenProtein for various reasons:

  • DEMO plants demonstrate the process on a continuous basis.
  • …provide design data for scaling the commercial-scale plant.
  • …determine the reagent consumption expected in the commercial plant.
  • …provide data for evaluating process economics, including capital and operating costs.
  • …provide environmental data
  • …test materials of construction.
  • …determine the potential for scale buildup.
  • …provide product for customer evaluation representative of what will be made in the commercial plant.

Source: SCALEUP ISSUES FROM BENCH TO PILOT, Dennis Gertenbach1 and Brian L. Cooper2, Paper 509f, presented at the AIChE National Meeting, November 12, 2009, Nashville, TN

October 10th: GreenProtein DEMO Plant opens

Greenprotein demo plant and general assembly

After 3 years of project development (and with almost 1 year and half still to go), the Demonstration Plant (DEMO Plant) described above is ready and operative. Particularly, the GreenProtein Demo plant has been built as compact design, ready to be “plugged” to the production line, and so it is an easily replicable system with a high spreading projection in whole EU. Of course, this is a big step forward and a notorious success for the project! All project partners together with BBI JU, industry and media representatives will gather the 10th of October to celebrate and present the new GreenProtein DEMO plant.

Follow us on social media with the hashtag #GreenProteinDEMOPlant for the last updates!

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