Taiwan's China Steel Joins Hands with LYC Chemical and U.S.'s LanzaTech to Explore Biomass Fuel Market

Taipei, Nov. 15, 2012 (CENS)--Taiwan's China Steel Corp. has joined hands with LYC Chemical Corp. and the U.S.-based LanzaTech NZ Ltd. to explore the lucrative market for biomass fuel.

To that end, China Steel, Taiwan's largest steelmaker, and LYC Chemical, the leading chemical manufacturer on the island, have just set up a joint venture, White Biotech Corp., to develop such biomass materials as ethanol using LanzaTech's technologies initially and then extend its reach to niche products as butadiene.

Tsou Juo-chi, China Steel's chairman, said that the initial paid-in capital of the joint venture is NT$150 million, with shares equally held by China Steel and LYC Chemical. Tsou pointed out that the new company will set up a demonstrative plant in the short term, and then will utilize waste gas generated from steelmaking to massively produce ethanol. If its mass production is built smoothly, the new company will attain annual output of NT$4 billion a year.

The success of the joint venture's mass production will rest with LanzaTech's anaerobic bacteria-based fermentation technology, which can extract ethanol fuel from waste gas generated from blast furnaces in steel mills more efficiently than crops and ordinary gas, and hence is regarded as a cutting edge in the emerging industry. The U.S. firm has cooperated with China's Baosteel Group Corp. since this April to set up a demonstrative plant with planned annual output of 100,000 gallons of ethanol. If the two parties' ethanol commercialization is successful, output of the biomass fuel will be 100 times that of the current demonstrative plant.

Tsou indicated that by using waste gas generated from furnaces to turn out biomass fuel, his company aims to cut carbon emission by 16% in the production of every metric ton of crude steel in 2020, which will represent a reduction of 1.97 metric tons of carbon dioxide emission a year.

M.W. Lee, chairman of LYC Chemical, is optimistic about cooperation between the companies on biomass fuel, which can help leverage LYC Chemical's competitive advantages in ethanol production and accelerate the company's evolution into an eco-driven manufacturer.