Whitefox is intent on presenting its clients with substantial improvements in a number of areas of the Ethanol production process. We aim to provide Ethanol producers with plants that are significantly more efficient and therefore profitable than they would have been without our introduced and integrated technological developments.
Our focus is therefore on understanding those aspects that impact our customers’ profit margins, be they in respect to energy costs, production capacity or both, while making relevant improvements to increase customers’ profit margins dramatically, enabling them to realise short-term paybacks of investment.
Our objective is not only to design the most energy efficient or economical plants, but to design the most profitable plants – using technology that will enable our customers to become industry leaders.
Whitefox does not promote off-the-shelf products to its customers. It recommends products adapted for particular needs.
Our technology portfolio consists of technologies that relate to quality/quantity of the product (e.g. ethanol concentration levels) and the energy intensive steps in the process. This is why Whitefox’ technologies have a dramatic impact on the entire ethanol production process.
Our technologies can be integrated into the following process steps:
- Mash Cooking
- Enzyme Liquefaction
- Fermentation
- Distillation
- Dehydration
- Stillage Treatment
We have been proving and improving our technologies since January 2000. We have carried out extensive in-house research and development and have worked with a number of internationally well-regarded strategic alliance partners on development projects, through consortia which we organised and coordinated.
We chose to prove our ethanol dehydration technologies in full-scale, continuous production industrial operations for over four years before beginning the process of commercialising our know-how. The extensive experience gained enables us to offer long-term warranties.
Our technology is used both by customers producing only fuel ethanol and by customers producing only industrial grade ethanol. However, a plant which employs Whitefox’ membrane modules is able to produce both fuel and industrial grades of ethanol – giving customers the flexibility they may need to react quickly to changes in market demand at any time.
The superiority of our core technology and our ability to integrate our knowledge is demonstrated by the fact that our technologies and system information are currently being used in the retro-fit and new build construction of plants designed to produce over 1.6 million metric tonnes (520 million US gallons per year) of MFGE (Motor Fuel Grade Ethanol -- with an ethanol purity of 99.6%) in the USA alone.
The layout and energy balance of a Whitefox fully integrated system will often be very different from that of a traditional or standard plant. Nevertheless, the cost of a retrofitting such plants can be recovered very quickly.
Whitefox Solutions
Whitefox offers its technology and enhanced production and profitability for the following applications:
- Retrofits of low, medium and high pressure plants
- New Build construction of low, medium and high pressure plants
The process improvements we are able to make are centred around the integration of our vapour permeation technology for ethanol dehydration. Our membranes are capable of dehydrating aqueous ethanol with water content of 50% to 99.95%. We can achieve this at atmospheric pressure as well as at elevated pressures.
The dehydration process using our membranes operates on a continuous basis rather than on a batch-basis as there is no saturation of the membrane. In addition, the way the Whitefox membrane modules are designed makes maintenance very simple and cost efficient: because of their modular nature it is not necessary to stop the entire process to carry out maintenance on an individual module.
Whitefox’ modules are extremely diverse and require neither a lot of additional retrofitting for their operations nor further cooling apparatus. Compared to conventional technologies their required space is low.
Our extensive know-how enables Whitefox to warrant the quality and the quantity of the contractually agreed production capacity for the entire period of a technology licence.
