Vertoro B.V.

The Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL Planbureau voor de Leefomgeving) concludes in her most new report that, notwithstanding often quite vocal public and political skepticism, #biofuels have an indispensable role to play in the fight against #climatechange. In an interview with Het Financieele Dagblad, Director Marko Hekkert of the Agency in question states (quote) "Some people like this, others like that. But the time to have opinions about everything is over. You have to use the entire palette. And you cannot delay policy". We at Vertoro B.V. could not agree more. The time to act is now and the time to be picky about it is over. https://lnkd.in/e-nqz5sC

More news on our exploits in the yachting world. Lots more to follow soon... Quadrise Plc Focus Motor Yachts PROACTIVE INVESTORS LIMITED https://lnkd.in/eXyEtS32

We successfully completed our first continuous 72-hour run in our demo plant and produced some 8 metric tons of crude #lignin oil (CLO®) in the process. CLO is a blend of lignin oligomers, branded Goldilocks® fully solubilized in (m)ethanol. Please enjoy our celebratory movie. Big shout to our technical team and partners! Takenaka Europe GmbH Brightlands Chemelot Campus

Cleaner combustion technology is often first introduced in the luxury market. For example, the world's first gasoline engine with direct injection, a system designed by Bosch, was the legendary 1954 Mercedes-Benz AG-Benz 300SL Gullwing. In this same spirit, Vertoro B.V. will develop and produce cleaner burning, advanced biofuels, as well as more sustainable materials, together with Focus Motor Yachts. More details will be made public at the 2024 Cannes Yachting Festival from 10-15 September. https://lnkd.in/e_mJFEtn

Wow, what an eventful week. A royal visit and the start of our first 72 hour production run in the demo plant. Hard to beat for sure, but something new is brewing and will be shared here in the coming weeks.

An honour of course to give our Queen a tour of our brand new demonstration plant and to discuss our ambitions to become the world’s first sustainable oil major.

On February 14th, we received a notice from the European Union Intellectual Property Office that a Certificate of Registration for the trademark #CLO, short for crude #lignin oil, was issued. For technologies companies like us, a strong intellectual property portfolio is vital and trademarks play an important role in our portfolio. CLO® now completes our C-Suite of crude oil trademarks, alongside crude sugar oil (#CSO®) and crude extractives oil (#CEO®).

On January 31, our newest European Patent application (EP4311825A1) was published. Herein, we outline our process to extract #lignin #monomers from our crude lignin oil (#CLO). Shown in the figure below is the principal monomer we extract when using softwood as a feedstock. This new bolt-on process to our current 1ktpa continuous demo plant, co-funded with a recent €2M Just Transition Fund grant (#HOUDINI) makes Vertoro B.V. the largest (up to 10 tons per annum) lignin monomer producer in the world and orders of magnitude ahead of our competition. Capacity will increase another 10x in our 10ktpa flagship plant now under construction in the Port of Rotterdam.

From our first patent application in 2017 to the first 8-hour continuous demonstration-scale production run yesterday. It has been quite the journey. Our product coming off the line? That's #Goldilocks; the world's first and only high-purity, low-molecular weight (#oligomeric) #lignin that can now be produced at kiloton per annum scale. Unique selling points of oligomeric lignin in general are that it is fully soluble at room temperature in most polar organic solvents (like #methanol in the video below) and, equally important, that is melt-flowable. These attributes allow for superior downstream processing towards many known lignin applications compared to all other branded (polymeric) lignins on the market today. So, lignin oligomers are easy to process, but still large enough to retain all well-established, high-value, natural functionalities of lignin, such as UV-stabilization, as well as anti-oxidant and anti-microbial effectivity. These properties are largely lost forever if the lignin is processed too severely, i.e., de-polymerized down to monomers. This is the rationale behind our brand name #Goldilocks. Just like in the eponymous fairy tale, we do not like our lignin fragments to be too large, nor too small, but "just right". We started processing requests for production slots earlier this year, with the first free ones now available late Q3 this year. Intermediate bulk containers (IBCs) today. Tanker trucks tomorrow. Supertankers the day after.

Kick-off meeting today at the Green Chemistry Campus for a new Just Transition Fund project, #SLICE, which aims to convert regional agricultural- and forestry residues into sustainable #methanol, #aromatics, and #fuels. We look forward to scaling up the associated Vertoro B.V. and TNO biomass conversion technologies, and to further create local (re-)educational programs in close collaboration with the Green Chemistry Campus to accelerate the energy transition in the Regio West-Brabant. Special thanks to Vindsubsidies and Stimulus Programmamanagement for assisting in the project application and grant processes.