Ethanol has the potential of significantly reducing the United States dependence on foreign oil. From every barrel of oil (40 gals) approximately 20 gallons of gasoline is produced.

Modern automobiles can burn a mixture of gasoline ranging between 12% and 85% ethanol combined with 88% gasoline and 15% gasoline, E-12 and E-85.
Currently there are approximately 7.5 billion gallons of ethanol produced in the United States a year. Over 99% of this ethanol uses corn grain as the starting material.

Pan Gen Global has a US patent that can use cellulose (woody portion of all plant life) to produce ethanol; the starting materials for our process are rice straw and rice hulls, and in the future corn stover and cobs, wheat straw and husks, wood chips from forest slashing, and sawdust from saw mills. How much ethanol can be produced from these cellulose-based raw materials? Using 2003 farm data from the US Department of Agriculture and taking into consideration the availability of these cellulose based materials, it has been conservatively estimated that over 1.0 trillion gallons of ethanol could be produced per year. This would reduce the importation of oil by an estimated 75%. Pan Gen Global will initially build a 130,000 ton/yr rice straw plant near Colusa, CA. This plant will produce 12.5 million gallons of fuel ethanol, 16,800 tons of silica products, commercial carbon dioxide, and a high energy lignin fuel that will be used internally in the plant to reduce the cost of natural gas.


Comparisons between our system and traditional spiral wound membrane systems

A spiral wound membrane, both RO and UF; this increases the surface area of the membrane winding a membrane/separator system into the shape of a star. Due to the membrane/separator proximities spiral wound membranes are “plugged” by particulate matter in the feed liquid.

The Pan Gen Global system differs from the spiral wound systems by placing the membrane directly in contact with the feed liquid and pumping this feed liquid at a high flow rate. This flow rate acts to “sweep” the membrane and prevents “plugging.”

The niche that Pan Gen Global's system can fill is its ability to filter thixotropic (viscous) Newtonian and non-Newtonian liquids. For example, our UF system can take tomato juice (Newtonian liquid) and by removing the water, produce tomato paste (non-Newtonian liquid.)

Our ultrafiltration (UF) can be cast to do total rejection of 5,000 to 20,000 molecular weight (MW) molecules. For example, large molecules (lignin), enzymes, bacteria, lactose, colloidal matter, fine suspended particulate matter, and proteins will not pass through the membrane.

We claim:
A method for producing lignin fuel, silica/sodium oxide, cellulose, and cellulose derivatives from plant biomass comprising the steps of placing the plant biomass in a hammermill or ball mill and grinding the plant biomass to 45 to 55 mesh, feeding the reduced size biomass into the first counter-current extractor, admixing the biomass with a mild acid solvent solution of acetic, carbonic, hydrochloric, phosphoric, or sulfuric acid at a temperature between 40 and 60 degrees C. and a residence time between 50 and 70 minutes, withdrawing a solvent stream from the first counter-current extractor containing 5-carbon sugars, soluble plant proteins, and soluble polypeptides which is passed to a fermentation tank where the 5-carbon sugars are fermented to ethanol,

withdrawing a solid material stream from the first counter-current extractor and passing the solid material through a belt-press filter, dewatering the solid material to between 70% and 80% total solids, and feeding the dewatered solid material stream into a second counter-current extractor, admixing the solid material with a caustic hydroxide solution, dissolving the lignin and silica,

withdrawing a solvent stream from the second counter-current extractor containing the lignin and caustic silicate and passing the solvent to an ultrafiltration membrane system, separating and concentrating the lignin from the solvent containing the caustic solution,

withdrawing from the ultrafiltration membrane unit a caustic silicate solution whereby a silica caustic oxide solution is produced,

withdrawing between 10% and 20% of the caustic silicate solution from the ultrafiltration membrane unit and sending the caustic silicate solution to the caustic solvent added to the second counter-current extractor as a feed-back solvent,

withdrawing the solid stream from the second counter-current extractor and passing the solid stream to a washing centrifuge and passing the solid to a belt-press filter dewatering the solid to 75% total solids,

withdrawing the solid from the belt-press filter and passing the solid to a tank wherein the solid cellulose material is converted to a glucose steam using acid hydrolyzing enzymes,


Silica Uses in Industry

The largest industrial uses of Silica/Sodium Oxide (Sodium Silicate) are in the Paper Industry; the Pap Products (de-inking, paper tubes, etc.); Detergent & Soap producers, Producers of Gels, Catalysts and Zeolites; Foundries in the production of molds, etc.; Soil Stabilization; Silica Sols, Water Treatment, and Coatings.