The Quest for the Holy Grail of Bio-Based Products

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Which Is the Most Promising Bio-Based Chemical?

When new processes and products enter the market it’s human nature to ask who does best in the competition. For the uninvolved observer it may be simple curiosity, for investors it’s a matter of money — and lots of it — to decide whether to jump on the bio-based bandwagon and which car to take.

In 2004 the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has defined twelve top value added chemicals from biomass. These products seemed to be the most promising at that time but a lot has happened in the last decade. In the follow-up report of 2016 there is again a list of twelve promising chemicals. The overlap between the two lists is moderate and consists of glycerol, succinic acid and para-xylene.

The European Union, too, strives to identify the chemicals that are predestined to be made from biomass. Road To Bio is a EU-funded project set up in mid-2017 to deliver a roadmap by 2019 illustrating the ‘sweet spots’ for Europe’s chemical industry. In a first step, a long list with 120 chemicals at TRL 6 or higher was compiled that show potential for the chemicals market. In parallel, the value chains of 500 petrochemicals were analyzed from a purely technical point of view. 85 % of the value chains offer entry points where a petrochemical could be replaced by a bio-based one. The chemicals that were cited most often as replacable are ethylene, propylene and methanol.

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The NREL report and Road To Bio project have in common that they both examine products with a technology readiness level of 6 (TRL 6) or greater meaning that the production process has reached pilot scale. Furthermore the studies so far both work along the value chain of petrochemical products. A typical product tree starts from a low value feedstock like ethylene and branches into many higher value intermediates like polyethylene, ethylene oxide and vinyl acetate. The intermediates again have multiple uses; vinyl acetate can end up in an adhesive as well as in paint.

Whenever a chemical can in theory been replaced by a bio-based one this is called an entry point in Road To Bio. Overall, of the 120 chemicals identified in the long list for further analysis, only 49 have entry points into existing petrochemical value chains, while the other 71 are dedicated chemicals. Dedicated chemicals are those which have no fossil-based counterpart and thus offer unique production routes. Lactic acid as base for the bioplastic polylactic acid is a prominent example for a dedicated chemical. In contrast, drop-inchemicals are bio-based versions of existing chemicals . A third group, smart drop-in chemicals, are also chemically identical to their fossil counterparts but provide an additional advantage compared to ordinary drop-ins. This can be a faster and simpler production pathway or less energy use.

In the NREL analysis some products such as ethylene and methanol were consciously excluded as they would compete with chemicals derived from natural gas, which is not realistic. It remains to be seen if Road To Bio researchers take a similar route in the next step, in which they will analyze drop-ins and dedicated chemicals for their market potential.

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