Website: http://www.bbeu.org

Bio Base Europe Pilot Plant is a non for profit SME located in Ghent, Belgium. BBEPP was established as a multipurpose pilot and demo infrastructure for the bio economy and the key enabling technology Industrial Biotech. The initial funding came from Interreg Flanders-Netherlands project Bio Base Europe (2008-2013). BBEPP is fully operational since 2012.

BBEPP bridges the valley of death in the innovation chain of the bio based economy by bringing scientific research (TRL2-4) to scalable industry relevant environment (TRL5-6) or even to (pre-) industrial scale (TRL 7-8). This allows to validate the technology in a relevant environment and to obtain prototypes for market development or validation. Working on relevant and scalable equipment enables collection of the data for performing reliable techno economic and life cycle analyses. These analyses are required to engage management and/or investors and the partners in the value chain.
BBEPP fulfills such role in several publicly funded regional and EU-projects of which 19 are actually ongoing. BBEPP performs similar tasks in bilateral private collaboration with companies in the biotech domain and bio based economy. Since its establishment BBEPP served over 100 customers, (mainly EU) in over 200 different projects for development, scale up or pilot production.

The BBEPP employs 70 people, the project execution team counts 45 people of which over 25 with academic scientific education, mainly bio engineering sciences.

BBEPP will be mainly involved in WP2 and WP4. Within WP2 BBEPP will bring the technology to TRL4: with the upstream partners the most promising feedstock- extract combinations will be elaborated at lab & bench scale to establish process scheme, to enable a preliminary techno economic feasibility and to obtain samples for characterisation. The established processes will be reviewed by BBEPP quality experts to assess fit for food grade production. With a set of criteria the 4 most promising extraction processes will be selected for upscaling to TRL5.  Within WP4 BBEPP will bring the  selected extraction processes to TRL5. To this end the UAE & MWE pilots will be hosted at BBEPP, BBEPP will complement the process with upstream biomass preparation & downstream product purification process on industry relevant and scalable equipment. Data & products will be provided to WP5 for testing and WP6 for techno economic & life cycle analysis.