Iogen has invested over $500 million in research, development and demonstration, and has over 300 issued and pending patents.  Iogen’s first commercial biofuel facility has been built in Brazil by Raízen, a $30 billion Brazilian energy company.   In 2014, Raízen selected Iogen as its partner after a thorough analysis of 2G ethanol technology providers.   The facility has a capacity of 40 million litres per year of cellulosic ethanol.  It is closely integrated into Raízen’s existing Costa Pinto sugar mill in Piracicaba and has the capability to process ethanol from both bagasse from the sugar mill as well as tops and leaves from cane harvesting.

In 2004, Iogen became the first company to have successfully used modern "enzymatic hydrolysis" technology to produce commercial quantities of cellulosic biofuels.

Over the past eleven years, Iogen has been running a $100 million demonstration plant to convert cellulosic feedstocks like wheat straw, corn stover and bagasse into biofuels. Iogen’s demonstration plant is supported by state-of-the-art pilot and lab facilities.  Iogen has deployed a number of sequential generations of our process technology at demonstration scale and built a wealth of know-how in the drive to achieve continuous 24/7 operating reliability.

From 2007 to 2012, Iogen operated its demonstration plant as a regular production facility that was in 24-hour-a-day, seven-days-a-week operation.  The plant was staffed with a full complement of engineers, operators, and maintenance and lab staff. Approximately 1,100 samples were collected and analyzed on a weekly basis at the demonstration plant. Continuous operation with uptime approaching 85% was achieved.  This experience was essential in the scale-up of the technology and successful start-up at the Costa Pinto 2G facility. During thousands of hours of operating time, over 2 million litres of cellulosic ethanol was produced in the demonstration plant.

The demonstration plant is now being used more for testing and developing new improvements as well as validating the performance of different feedstocks and new technology innovations.