Avantium Is All-In

They are building their poly(ethylene furanoate) plant

Welcome to The Polymerist’s January issue on green polymer chemistry and circular materials. The idea of biobased polymers was the basis for my PhD and I like to try and follow developments in the market. Avantium has been a leader around making a relatively old polymer at scale known as polyethylene furanoate (PEF). For those who don’t know what PEF or it’s history is I’ve explained it here.

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The Netherlands based company Avantium signed a 90 million euro debt agreement in December 2021 to start building their flagship polyethylene furanoate (PEF) production facility. The new chemical plant will be capable of producing 5 kilotons of PEF per year, which roughly translates to 11 million pounds of resin capacity for the plant based plastic. To give some perspective, over a billion pounds of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) is recycled every year here in the United States, which is about 100x larger than this new chemical plant. Just over 20% of all PET consumed in the US is recycled. A key part of getting the plant constructed was supply agreements with customers:

Avantium has secured five offtake commitments representing over 50% of the total Flagship Plant capacity. Contracts were signed with specialty chemical company Toyobo (Japan), specialty polyester film producer Terphane (US), beverage bottling company Refresco (Netherlands), international rigid packaging supplier Resilux (Belgium), and an undisclosed major global food & beverage brand owner.

Earlier this week I wrote about how getting your manufacturing operations to capacity is critical in being able to do long term innovation. Avantium did this the hard way and innovated before they had the capacity. Only time will tell if these offtake agreements materialize and if they can fill up the remaining 50% of their flagship plant capacity.

The capacity of Avantium’s plant or the total size of how much plastic we produce, recycle, and landfill every year should not be our focus here. I’m not saying the issue isn’t important, but we can argue for decades about potential solutions we can implement actual solutions. If successful PEF could be a viable alternative to PET and it’s made from biomass. Avantium isn’t solving the plastic waste crisis here, but they are trying to solve a piece of the puzzle on our oil dependence.

The majority of our plastics come from oil and polyethylene terephthalate is no different. Avantium (and others such as Origin Materials) have developed new routes to commodity chemicals such as ethylene glycol (a building block of PET and PEF) and 2,5 furan dicarboxylic acid (the furan diacid used in PEF) from biomass. Of all the world’s oil about 12% is used to make chemicals and plastics and this means that the chemical industry gets to piggyback off of the oil industry’s scale. Having access to the economies of scale with oil in its current state has led to ridiculously low prices for plastics, specialty chemicals, and commodity chemicals. 

As access to new oil producing sites becomes more difficult due to costs, public pressure to stop oilfield development, and public policy, there is a potential for short term demand to outpace supply and prices to spike. On a long enough timeline there is probably a future where oil is not extracted at all, but this means we need to figure out a way to produce all of our chemicals and plastics from anything but oil now. If Elon Musk gets his way there will be a base on Mars at some point, but there are no oil fields on Mars, but biomass from plants might be there for food and oxygen generation purposes.

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There is a lot of writing and talk about greenwashing out there and a good way to avoid that is to not make claims that you can’t back-up. I don’t think Avantium is making any sort of claims about PEF saving the world from plastic waste, but I do think that having an open mind about these old technologies becoming new again with modern chemical engineering behind them is important to seeing progress through innovation in a field where innovation has become incremental.

The news from Avantium is also a big step towards commercialization of a new commodity plastic, which has not occurred since PET in the 1970s (unless you want to count PLA). I’m cautiously optimistic for Avantium because if they are successful then perhaps other start-ups in the space can succeed. PEF is more than just a plastic from plants, it’s a potential for the green chemistry future of our dreams to become reality. 

I can imagine Jim Moore, the principal investigator running the research group where PEF was first synthesized at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, saying something to the effect of, “about time.”

Tony