Beyond Betulin

Our ongoing R&D projects all begin with raw materials from the Norwegian forests

ANTI-MICROBIAL

As more and more organisms exhibit resistance to antibiotics, it is becoming increasingly important to minimize microbial contaminants on a range of everyday surfaces to which people are exposed. In order to reduce contaminant exposure, Norse Biotech’s anti-microbial project aims to reduce the spread of these pathogens by eliminating the potential for infection. To this end, we are developing a processing strategy to deliver an ideal product that would kill pathogens on contact and provide long term continuous protection on a variety of surfaces.

The anti-microbial project utilizes current research in order to identify selected plant extracts, such as locally sourced pine oil, that exhibit long term antimicrobial properties and develop new formulations based on these plant extracts. These formulations will form the basis for the development of a new, patentable class of natural disinfectant products.

PROTEINS

Commercializing biomass processing can pose a great challenge unless as much value as possible is derived from each available component in the biomass. One overlooked group of materials is proteins.

The proteins project will, for the first time anywhere, couple a new generation of process intensified (increased efficiency) extraction equipment with the use of a new class of solvents called deep eutectic solvents (DES) to enable the extraction and use of proteins as value generating products in the growing global protein market. The resultant residual biomass from this project is also a better feedstock for later biopolymer separation which will be utilized for additional value extraction.

CARBON BLACK

The carbon black project aims to understand the potential capability of biomass derived carbon black to replace oil derived carbon black as a more sustainable to solution to the production of carbon black. This effort is not only important for Norse Biotech AS, but also central to the global effort to develop sustainable replacement products for high volume oil based products such as carbon black.The carbon black research project will target the heat transfer properties of carbon black as the first market segment in which to demonstrate the performance of the product from this new source. This segment was chosen since this will be a lower volume but high valued starting point for a new product. This project is made conceivable by the fact that carbon black is already considered a high performance material with heat transfer properties that can be superior to commercial silver pastes.

CARBON NANOTUBES

The carbon nanotubes project intends to work with Norse Biotech’s project partner Norse Metal and an existing European carbon nanotube customer to gather the data needed to construct a pilot scale production research plant in Elverum to manufacture and innovate carbon nanotubes. Along with our partners, we will implement the existing patented catalyst and process design to gather further data towards optimizing carbon nanotube production. In addition, the pilot research facility will enable the process operating parameters to be optimized to facilitate the move from petroleum to bio-based feedstocks and create greener, high performing carbon nanotubes.

CARBON FIBER

The carbon fiber project will convert biomass into high valued carbon fiber in an effort to replace the oil-based feedstocks that are currently in use. It will exploit excess or waste biomass from various harvesting operations, initially from local forest excess and, in the long term, from farm and food processing excess as well. The cost-effective production of this next generation green fiber should provide a leadership position for Norwegian materials production in this rapidly growing green business area.