NARI leads the industry's low-carbon transformation based on biorefinery technology
Published：2025-03-28 11:14
Net zero carbon reduction has become a global consensus. Apart from mature renewable energy technology such as solar and wind, the effective utilization of biomass using biorefinery technology to provide energy, low-carbon materials and chemicals to substitute for fossil energy and petrochemicals is recognized as a win-win strategy for carbon reduction and the development of circular economy. The National Atomic Research Institute (NARI) has long been committed to developing non-food biorefinery technology and accumulated a variety of results as well as research and development capabilities. For example, the developed pretreatment technology that can effectively to break down the structure of biomass to separate lignin and cellulose, which can be used as low-carbon materials. The glucose hydrolysis from cellulose can be fermented by NARI’s specialized bacterial strains through fermentation technology into a variety of valuable products for industrial application, such as bioethanol, lactic acid, biosynthetic dyestuffs and marine degradable plastics PHAs. In addition, NARI’s innovative technology for enhancing biogas production from lignocellulosic biomass involves mixing a small amount of the pretreated biomass with livestock wastewater for anaerobic fermentation, resulting in the biogas yield increased by 2 times, greatly enhancing the economics of biogas power generation.
Regarding R&D capabilities, NARI has established the only biorefinery pilot plant in Taiwan, which can assist industries in conducting technical verification at a pilot scale. Moreover, the intelligent high-throughput screening technology can speed up research development and deliver customized services to meet industrial requirements. For instant, NARI has collaborated with the local forest industry in New Zealand to create an innovative forest management model that integrates forest carbon sinks with biorefinery, leading to an increase in economic value by more than 86 times. With this outstanding achievement, a 2023 R&D 100 Award was rewarded for its “FixCarbon Technology: Carbon-Negative Bioplastics from Afforestation”.
Looking to the future, NARI has collaborated with industry to establish a bamboo-based birefinery demonstration field involved in industry and supply chain, along with bamboo carbon sinks, to lay the basis for industrial development of domestic biorefineny. NARI is a great partner to help domestic industries to create an emerging low-carbon technologies for industry transformation.
NARI's biorefinery technology has helped increase the value derived from New Zealand's forest carbon sinks by more than 86 times.
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