Wood-to-feed project update
The first in the final series of webinars by the Sylfeed project that is developing salmonid feed from woody biomass will be held at 3pm BST / 4pm CET today.
The speakers are Birgir Orn Smarason and Alexandra Leeper from Icelandic food and biotech R&D company Matís, which is part of the project consortium, and Ricardo Ekmay, from US wood-to-feed producer Arbiom, the project beneficiary.
The Sylfeed project, which started in 2017, has been working on the upscaling a biorefinery concept that can convert woody biomass into high-value single cell protein (SCP) for use as animal feed, most notably in increasing fish production.
An excellent raw material
Wood residues are abundant and highly sustainable, while SCP has an amino-acid profile close to that of fish, making it an excellent raw material in fish feed formulation, say the project’s organisers.
The overall objective of the project is to build a demonstration plant with the capacity of treating 15 tonnes of biomass per day, or up to 5,000 tonnes of biomass per year.
In October last year Arbiom announced that it had successfully achieved a critical step by completing continuous, stable operation of its fermentation technology over a seven-day period without contamination or product quality issues, producing more than half a tonne of its SCP feed ingredient, SylPro.
€11m investment
The production took place at the Bio Base Europe Pilot Plant (BBEPP) - a service provider for process development, scale-up and custom manufacturing of biobased products and processes - in Belgium.
The Bio-based Industries Joint Undertaking (BBI JU), a €3.7 billion partnership between the EU and the Bio-based Industries Consortium, has contributed nearly €11m to the project.
Register for the webinar here.
