Established by the Pavlovi family, which manages one of Bulgaria’s largest agricultural businesses, Eta Bio will construct, own and operate a full-scale commercial plant on a greenfield site in General Toshevo, in the country’s northeast.

The facility will process about 250,000 t/y of wheat straw – an abundant resource in the region – and produce 50,000 t/y of cellulosic ethanol. Clariant did not give a date for the plant to go on stream.

“The realization of the first Bulgarian cellulosic ethanol production project will help to solve one of the main challenges agricultural producers face in the region – the removal of the straw from the fields. This project will give us the chance to have an additional revenue stream from agricultural leftovers,” said Eta Bio’s managing director Kiril Pavlov.

The plant’s output will be used as a gasoline additive to fulfil Bulgaria’s blending mandate for advanced biofuels, as set out in the Renewable Energy Directive (RED) II.

Catalyst activities gather momentum

Clariant has won a second contract with China’s Dongguan Grand Resource Technology (DGR) for its Catofin catalysts. The award follows DGR’s successful start-up of a 600,000 t/h Catofin propane dehydrogenation (PDH) unit last October. The second 600,000 t/y PDH unit is scheduled to be commissioned in 2022.

Also in China, Clariant said its joint off-gas treatment with Jiangsu Jinneng has been successfully operating since November 2019 at Shandong Qilu Plasticizers’ phthalic anhydride (PA) plant in Zibo, Shandong.

The treatment, which employs Clariant’s EnviCat VOC catalyst, purifies production off-gas, which contains volatile organic compounds and carbon monoxide. The 70,000 t/y PA plant already uses Clariant’s OxyMax PA 690 catalyst.