Industrial Automation Magazine India

Yokogawa signs investment and partnership agreement with Bloom Biorenewables

Published on : Friday 21-08-2020

The agreement with Swiss Startup will accelerate the use of biomass in chemical production.

August 2020 – Yokogawa Electric Corporation has announced that it has signed an investment and partnership agreement with Bloom Biorenewables SA (Bloom), a Swiss startup company focusing on the utilisation of biomass, with the aim of developing business opportunities in the bioeconomy field. The two companies will collaborate on the commercialisation of a breakthrough technology from Bloom that maximises the extraction of lignin from plant material to replace petrochemicals in a range of chemical products.

Yokogawa and Bloom are both undertaking initiatives to promote the bioeconomy, which involves the utilisation of biomass and biotechnology to solve global issues such as the depletion of natural resources and climate change and enable long-term, sustainable growth. The agreement brings together Bloom's lignin extraction technology with Yokogawa's advanced technologies and knowhow related to the automation of industrial production processes, as well as its global sales network.

Bloom was established in January 2019 as a spinoff from EPFL, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. With the mission of making biomass a true alternative to petroleum, the startup is initially focusing on commercialising it’s new, far more efficient method of extracting lignin, especially monolignol, from biomass material such as wood. Its immediate goal is to demonstrate the technology in a pilot-scale plant.

Blooms CEO, Dr Remy Buser, commented, “This new collaboration will help strengthen interactions with large industrial groups, drive internationalisation, and ultimately accelerate market entry, which are all essential factors for countering climate change and having a significant impact.”

Tsuyoshi Abe, a Yokogawa senior vice president, and head of the Marketing Headquarters, added, “Yokogawa aims to contribute to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals through its core business activities, and the bioeconomy is a focus area in our long-term business framework. Lignin has huge long-term potential as a petroleum replacement, and we have high expectations that together we can contribute to the increased utilisation of biomass by integrating Bloom’s outstanding technology and Yokogawa’s decades of experience in industry.”