The Quest for the Holy Grail of Bio-Based Products

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Four chemicals that appear on both the top twelve NREL list and among the 49 Road To Bio chemicals with potential entry points are succinic acid, para-xylene, 1,2-propanediol and glycerol.

Succinic Acid

The current world market for the dicarboxylic acid is around 50,000 metric tons/year and intended for specialty chemicals. In everyday life you may encounter it in the ink of your desktop printer, where 3 % succinic acid make that colors don’t bleed into each other. However, the projected market is large and that this projection is a very real thing is reflected in the production plants that are set up worldwide. Between the four of them and in various joint ventures Succinity, Bio Amber, Myriant and Reverdia are building production capacities of more than 400,000 metric tons succinic acid per year. Microorganisms used for the fermentation are B. succiniproducens, E. coli and S. cerevisiae.

The companies count on succinic acid becoming a platform chemical, opening up a much broader product range than just specialty chemicals. Hydrogenation of succinic acid to 1,4-butanediol and tetrahydrofuran could access another market of combined 2.4 million metric tons per year. If this becomes a reality your spandex clothing and polyurethane mattress can be bio-based, too, in the future.

Para-Xylene

Para-xylene used to produce both terephthalic acid and dimethyl terephthalate, the two constituents of polyethylene terephthalate (PET). It is nearly exlusively used to manufacture polyesters with the majority destined for fibers and films. The 27 % going into PET bottle resin, however, are the ones that got the most attention from bioeconomy media in the last few years. Major consumers of PET - the Coca-Cola Company, Ford, Heinz, Nike and Procter & Gamble - have funded research for the production of renewable PET. Virent has developed a hybrid biochemical and thermochemical process that converts biomass into a mixture of hydrocarbons. This can be treated just like petroleum-derived hydrocarbons.

A 100 % plant-based bottle was showcased at Expo Milan in 2015 (Lane 2015), made with para-xylene from a demonstration plant but commercial production is expected not before 2021. Micromidas and Annellotech base their chemo-catalytic processes on cellulosic feedstocks, too, while Biochemtex counts on lignin. The only company using fermentation is Gevo: sugars from biomass are converted by a yeast into isobutanol which is then chemically transformed into para-xylene.

For the time being none of the companies has the capacity to make a dent in the 65 million metric ton per year market.

Bio-based MEG can be used for polyester fabrics and PET plastic bottles. (Haldor Topsoe)

1,2-Propanediol

Makes your skin soft and your hair easy to comb as an ingredient in body lotion and shampoo. Beyond that it has a myriad of uses ranging from pet food to polyester resins, resulting in a global market of around 2.5 million metric tons per year.

1,2-propanediol is also known as propylene glycol and is currently produced from propylene as a coproduct of petroleum cracking, therefore its price is closely connected to the petroleum price. Bio-based 1,2-propanediol is usually produced by hydrogenolysis of glycerin with mixed-metal catalysts with the catalyst formulation and reaction conditions being the variables. ADM has 100,000 metric tons annual production capacity in the US and Oleon 20,000 metric tons per year in Belgium. Global Bio-Chem operates a 200,000 metric tons per year plant in China using sorbitol from corn as feedstock. The sorbitol is hydrocracked into 1,2-propanediol, ethylene glycol and butanediol.

Glycerol

The sugar alcohol can be used in bodylotion as well as in marzipan, to keep both your skin and the almond paste soft and tender. Apart from that glycerol has more than 1,500 other uses. The petrochemical production route for glycerol starts from propene but plays only a minor role. The market is dominated by bio-based glycerol as a byproduct of biodiesel production. For this vegetable oil is trans esterified with an alcohol; for every ten tons of biodiesel one ton of glycerol is produced. With a yearly production of about two million tons of glycerol worldwide the market is saturated, resulting in stable and historically low prices. Industry is therefore looking for ways to add value to glycerol. Use as a substrate for fermentation processes such as succinic acid, citric acid, 1,3-propanediol or biogas are in part commercially proven as is application as animal feed.

Most chemical plants are based on conventional design and construction, but the engineering departments at chemical companies and EPC contractors are about to make major changes to the engineering process. (Pixabay)

And the Winner Is…? Cooperation!

If predicting the success of a bio-based product were easy governments worldwide would not employ legions of scientists and commission studies to do so. Only time will tell which of the cited bio-based chemicals will become a blockbuster and whether Road To Bio will come to the same conclusions as the NREL study. The petroleum price and governmental interventions are only two of the more unpredictable factors in the multi-parameter matrix which determines the economic success of a bio-based product. One of the communalities of the four chemicals discussed above is that they are drop-in chemicals. They are chemically identical to their fossil counterparts and for further processing it doesn’t play a role whether they are made from petroleum or from biomass

On closer inspection the production processes of promising drop-in chemicals are an eclectic mix of chemical and biotechnological. Fermentation steps are followed by chemical transformations; whether a metal catalyst or an enzyme is used is just a matter of what works best. Anything goes as long it is technically feasible. A process is no longer either chemical or biotechnological, cooperation is the new normal. Winners in the quest for the holy grail of bio-based chemicals are definitely the scientists from all the different disciplines involved. They have learned to look past the rim of the teacup of their own sector and gained a whole new perspective in their neighbor’s teacup.

Achema 2018 focal topic “Biotech for Chemistry” puts the spotlight on the fact that biotechnology and chemistry are growing together. The congress program features presentations about novel processes and products while the exhibition shows equipment of every scale for both biotechnological and chemical techniques.

Download the complete studies of Road To Bio and NREL.

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Trend Report: Bio-Based Products