Bio-Based Aniline Beet Fields Instead of Oil Fields: How Bio-Tech and Chemistry Create Green Chemicals

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It dyes jeans blue, is found in PUR foam and rocket fuel and is extracted from naphtha on a scale of millions of tons: Aniline. The versatile basic chemical is set to turn green thanks to bioprocess engineering - a project in Leverkusen shows how straw can be turned into plastic

In the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, magical powers were needed to spin straw into gold. Today, without any hocus-pocus, straw, biomass or sugar beet may not be turned into precious metals, but into valuable raw materials for basic chemistry. After all, the masters of molecules are still dependent on oil, gas and naphtha in the 21st century. Given the enormous importance of the hundreds of thousands of hydrocarbons, there will hardly be a decarbonization of the industry, as is so often demanded. And even electricity cannot solve all the problems.

But how can the sector free itself from its dependence on at least fossil raw materials and the associated emissions problems? One possibility would be chemical recycling, i.e. keeping carbon in circulation, another would be the use of biomass. After all, organic chemistry is not called that for no reason, as almost all biomolecules, just like all life, are based on the almost infinite variety of carbon-hydrogen compounds.