Carbon Emissions Go Into Shoes
The Green Chemistry and Circular Economy November Issue
I can’t believe it is November already. Next month will be the last issue of this part of the newsletter for 2021. The sheer volume of green chemistry news coming out of industry is intense and it’s hard to keep up. One newsletter that I’ve come to rely on for writing this newsletter is The Column, which sends out an email three times a week about the recent news in the chemical industry. If you want more emails in your inbox about the chemical industry then consider signing up.
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I want to take a minute to introduce the sponsor of the next 8 issues of the newsletter CPS. My first contact with CPS was through Stephanie Kemp, a recruiter in their lab division, who was trying to get me a job closer to the DC/Maryland area back when I lived in Kentucky. The job she was trying to get me never panned out, but I’ve stayed in touch with her. Whenever someone hits me up on LinkedIn for a chemistry job I send them her way. You reach her via her email: skemp@cps4jobs.com or on LinkedIn. More on this later.
Plants to Chemicals and Fuels
Braskem, a big Brazilian chemical company, has been big into bio-based (or is it biobased?) ethanol for what seems like years now. I was reading about their efforts around ethanol to ethylene when I was in graduate school back in the mid 2010s. Braskem unveiled a bio-based polyethylene wax back in June and they invested about $61 million back in February in additional bio-based polyethylene capacity. If it’s not obvious Braskem makes the majority of their ethylene and polyethylene the old fashioned way, via steam cracking of ethane, which they get from petroleum.
Braskem’s latest news on this front is with Lummus and their signing of a Memorandum of Understanding around licensing Braskem’s green polyethylene technology.
"Our partnership with Braskem is a very important building block that will strengthen Lummus' technology leadership in the energy transition," said Leon de Bruyn, President and Chief Executive Officer of Lummus Technology. "As the world's largest ethylene technology provider, Lummus is confident in the green solutions we will be able to develop together with Braskem, the world's largest biopolymer producer and recognized for its role in the circular economy.
Braskem is primarily dependent on getting their ethylene from ethanol. The ethanol comes from sugarcane much in the way we might make rum via fermentation and distillation. From that ethanol Braskem dehydrates it to yield a water molecule and ethylene and from ethylene we can make a whole bunch of stuff including polyethylene.
Just remember there are also other ways of getting ethanol from non-food sources such as cellulosic ethanol. Verbio acquired DuPont’s former cellulosic ethanol plant back in 2018. Verbio is not necessarily producing just ethanol out of the site, they are also producing renewable natural gas from corn stover and agriculture cellulosic waste. Their most recent announcement back in September expanded on their plans for the Nevada biorefinery.
In its latest announcement, Verbio said it is expanding biomethane capacity in the U.S. from 20 megawatts (MW) to 80 MW, with the group implementing the Verbio biorefinery concept at the Nevada plant site. In the future, the company said raw material for the biomethane plant will include residual waste from the production of ethanol in addition to straw. The Nevada facility is scheduled to be complete by the end of 2022.
With natural gas prices hitting record highs in a lot of places this appears to be quite the prescient move by Verbio, one of the largest biofuel producers in Europe.
The other recent story in this space that I saw was that Chevron announced a renewable synthetic motor oil. While this might seem kind of “late to the party” I suspect that we will be using internal combustion engines for years to come, especially in things like long haul trucking and heavy machinery. Lubricating oils like the ones we put into our internal combustion engines now are often made from heavier oil distillates, but the latest Havoline product from Chevron uses 25% renewable plant oils.
Ten years ago, I think most green chemists would be jumping for joy at the Chevron news, but even now I was debating if I should even include it here. It seems almost normal or expected for me at this point to see these things and think, “Oh, they should push that number higher.” Directionally for the industry it feels right to me and I hope that in the end the world is better for it. With oil prices climbing though I suspect that this gives some better pricing flexibility on the part of Chevron.
I figure companies are always out to make a buck and if they can make more money doing things that utilize biomass or that are less carbon intensive then this aligns well with making money. We shouldn’t underestimate the power of capitalism in these areas.
The other strategy around green chemistry and circular materials economies are taking waste products such as plastic waste or emissions and turning this trash into high value raw materials, intermediates, or finished goods that people can use. We can think of this type of circular cycle as the Philosopher’s Stone of Trash.
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Waste to Chemicals and Materials
The power of this type of green chemistry or circular economic model is that the companies in this area have the opportunity to get paid to take someone’s trash. Maybe that trash looks like mixed plastic recycling at a material recovery facility or it is carbon emissions such as carbon dioxide or methane. Either way these economic models can enable our “trash” to become more valuable raw materials and you don’t just let money blow away in the wind and into rivers do you?
The running shoe company On announced a partnership with Borealis Group and Lanzatech to turn carbon emissions into ethylene vinyl acetate foam. I wrote about Lanza tech last October when they made a cosmetics bottle from emissions waste with Total and L’Oreal as partners. Well, they are back, but this time they are partnered with Borealis and On to make ethylene vinyl acetate foam, also known as the midsole of most running shoes. On calls this EVA foam CleanCloud.
LanzaTech is enabling the emissions to raw material that Borealis will use to transform into EVA foam that On can put in their shoes. This means that LanzaTech is making ethylene and vinyl acetate from emissions, which is an expansion on their earlier proof of concept with Total and L’Oreal. Borealis just has to take these familiar raw materials, do the polymerization, and make the foam.
This is definitely a more difficult route to pursue for large scale materials generation, but I think there are certain areas where we have not been able to get away from carbon emissions such as cement and steel production. Companies like LanzaTech are going to be critical in blazing the path towards carbon dioxide as a raw material.
Sure, there might be higher prices in the short term for these materials, but a high end running shoe is the perfect place to pass that cost onto a well to do consumer who can handle it, might even want to pay for it.
Less than 60 days to the end of the year and 8 days until my birthday. Talk to you next week.