Someday, your Spandex tights and car dashboard may be made out of sugar cane rather than petroleum, if start-up Genomatica succeeds on its plans.
The San Diego-based start-up on Tuesday said that it has reached a technical milestone in converting sugar--derived from sugar cane or beets--into an industrial plastic called 1,4-butanediol, or BDO. It's a material that's appeals to the auto, apparel, and pharmaceutical industries for a variety of uses.
Coaxing little bugs to do some heavy lifting.
(Credit: Genomatica)Genomatica uses a genetically modified strain of E.coli bacteria to convert sugar water into BDO through fermentation. On Tuesday it said it demonstrated that it can remove impurities from that fermented brew to make a 99 percent concentrated version of BDO.
"We're using a process that will continue to allow the overall economics of making BDO from sugars to be cost advantaged," said Genomatica CEO Christophe Schilling. "Not only do we purify it, but we purify it in a way that will allow us to use technologies known to scale."
Schilling said that at the current price of sugar and $50-per-barrel oil, the process is 25 percent cheaper than petroleum-based BDO. The cost advantage will attract customers, which are also interested in finding a plant feedstock that has a less volatile price than oil, he said.
The company plans to build a demonstration facility next year that will produce about one ton of BDO a day. A commercial-scale operation would 20 to 100 times larger.
Biological-based chemical manufacturing is poised for greater adoption in part because of volatile fossil fuel prices and because consumers are demanding products made from renewable materials, Schilling predicted. He noted that DuPont is using a fermentation-based process to make 1,3-propanediol (PDO), another industrial plastic.
If successful with its demonstration facility, Genomatica expects to license its technology to other chemical manufacturers.
Schilling said the company has plans for making other chemicals, using a suite of software modeling tools that speed up discovery of ways to manipulate microorganisms to make a desired product.
"Green chemistry" start-up Genomatica on Tuesday said that it has developed a process to use sugar, rather than petroleum, to produce a common industrial chemical.
The announcement, timed to coincide with the GoingGreen conference in San Francisco this week, is a milestone for the company which made a business strategy shift last year from developing software for genetic engineering to licensing specially designed micro-organisms.
Its first product is a bacteria tuned to turn sugar during fermentation into 1,4 Butanediol (BDO), a chemical used as an additive to textiles and car bumpers. The company expects to have its first customer next year.
By using sugar from sugar cane as a feedstock, industrial chemical companies can get a cheaper alternative to petroleum-derived chemicals, while investing in processes that are less polluting and nontoxic, said Genomatica CEO Chris Gann.
Gann said that the Genomatica uses simulation software to determine the most expedient way to customize E coli bacteria. Then genetic engineers manipulate genes so that the organisms grow while producing the desired characteristics.
Using environmentally benign or renewable feedstocks is part of a broader industry push toward green chemistry which advocates cleaner chemical processes and end products.
"I've spent almost 27 years in the chemicals industry and the amount of interest on the subject of (green chemistry) is increasing significantly," Gann said.
He said that its process will be cost-competitive with petroleum-based products even if the price of crude oil goes down to $50.
Segetis, a Minnesota-based green chemistry start-up, appears to have hired Jim Stoppert, a former Cargill and Dow executive with expertise in industrial bio-products.
Segetis is a green chemistry company, which received $15 million in funding from Khosla Venture last year.
It intends to use agricultural feedstocks to make products typically made from petroleum, such as plastics, solvents, and other specialty chemicals. But apart from a little bit of information about planned "sustainable chemistry solutions" on its Web site, the company has been quiet about its plans.
Stoppert worked at chemicals giant Dow and at Cargill as its director of industrial bioproducts. He was the CEO of a joint venture now called NatureWorks, which commercialized PLA (polylactide polymer), a corn-based plastic replacement used for containers, toys, and the like.
The Segetis Web site lists Khosla Ventures' chief scientific officer Doug Cameron as interim CEO, and founder and chief scientist, Sergey Selifonov, as its president.
But Stoppert is scheduled to represent the company at an industry conference, the Pacific Rim Summit on Industrial Biotechnology and Bioenergy, next month.
One industry source said Stoppert will be the CEO of Segetis. Neither Segetis nor Khosla Ventures has replied to requests to confirm Stoppert's hiring.
Like the heady days of the dot-com boom, a number of executives from incumbent energy and chemical firms are making the move to small green-tech companies with promising technologies.
In a recent example, Tesla Motors hired a 24-year Chrysler executive, Mike Donoughe, as executive vice president of vehicle engineering and manufacturing.
BOSTON--To many people, the term "green chemistry" is either a contradiction or a fancy name for long-held sensible chemistry practices.
All chemical products won't become benign overnight but they can get greener, even taking small steps, said Rich Engler, the program manager for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Green Chemistry Program.
Engler gave an overview of green chemistry at the CTSI Clean Technology conference here on Monday, where he said that most of what qualifies as green chemistry is focused on reducing the amount of hazards that chemicals introduce.
The impact of the green chemistry movement is substantial: The winners of last year's EPA Green Chemistry award program have prevented 200 million pounds per year of hazardous substances, he said. Since the program started, over 1 billion pounds of hazardous substances have been kept out of the environment.
"We recognize that there is an incremental nature to green chemistry. You can't take a year or two and make the chemistry industry completely benign. It's really a question of what is greener," he said.
Venture capitalists, including famed investor Vinod Khosla, have made green chemistry one their investment themes. In many case, green chemistry companies make better materials, such as Hycrete which makes a water-resistant concrete that is more durable.
Engler said that investing in new innovations costs chemical companies more. But there are a number of financial benefits, including cheaper and recyclable raw materials and less regulatory burden.
A company called Battelle, for example, developed a binding agent for printer cartridges that is made from glycerin, a by-product of biodiesel production. The process means that it has a cheap feedstock and lowers the energy production needed to make the toner binder.
In another case, Columbia Forest Products has started using a wood adhesive that uses a protein found in ocean mussels. The company uses soy flour rather than formaldehyde to make its adhesive.
In general, the focus of most green chemistry techniques is choosing renewable feedstocks that obviate the need for hazardous compounds, Engler said.
"Green chemistry is pollution prevention at the molecular level," he said.
Green chemistry is a green movement you may not have heard of, but one certainly worth paying attention to.
Over the past month, I got to hear some of the leading lights in the field, notably professors John Warner and Paul Anastas, speak about what green chemistry is and its effects. Click here for the full report.
Chemicals touch so many industries that the ideas behind green chemistry, such as reducing waste and making non-hazardous materials, can be applied very widely--electronics, pharmaceuticals, biofuels, bioplastics, water purification, green buildings, consumer health and care products.
In just one example, Anatsas, professor of green chemistry and green engineering at Yale University, said that the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide can be used as a feedstock to make other products, like environmentally benign building insulation. Start-up Novomer last week got funding to commercialize a process of using CO2 to make biodegradeable plastics.
Large companies need to start designing better materials to meet a growing number of regulations and calls from their customers to be responsible, argued some of the speakers who presented at the Green Chemistry Business Summit recently.
"More and more now, companies and industries are being held accountable for their environmental performance and social performance as well," said Berkeley Cue Jr., who started the green chemistry initiative at Pfizer.
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