Covestro Gets Approval For Wind Turbine Resin While Arkema Invests In Superglue Innovation

April Specialty Chemicals Issue

There is still significant tightness in the specialty chemicals market right now due to lack of raw material availability according to my sources. While companies are not declaring force majeure I have reports of companies being put on allocation. This means that companies are not getting 100% of what they need from their suppliers due to those suppliers not getting 100% of what they need from their suppliers. It’s a viscous cycle. This means alternate smaller suppliers in the supply chain will get chances at qualification if they have inventory. 

I suspect prices for most specialties are going to stay high for the next quarter at least and possibly stay there until all the chemical capacity in Texas is back online at 100%. There may be some more acute pain still ahead for chemical companies as demand starts to normalize to pre-pandemic levels due to the economy reopening. The first half of 2021 is shaping up to be a strange one.

There are two big stories I want to discuss today. The first involves a significant new volume opportunity for polyurethanes and the second is new technology around cyanoacrylates. 

Source

Polyurethanes For Composite Manufacturing

Readers might recall the big polymethylene diisocyanate (pMDI) shortage of 2018 that drove up prices in the polyurethane markets which was partially due to huge demand from a multitude of end markets. Polyurethanes have experienced significant growth over the past few years and are projected to grow at a 7.5% compound annual growth rate for the next few years. This estimate might be too low of a prediction due to a big new opportunity in wind power becoming available.

Covestro recently received their DNV certification for their new polyurethane infusion resins designed for wind turbine blades. This certification means that a third party has certified Covestro’s polyurethane infusion resin for use in wind turbine blades and is a key step in Covestro being able to sell into the wind turbine market against epoxy resins. I’ve written about epoxy resins previously with the new GE Haliade turbines becoming the largest commercial wind turbine in the world with 107 meter long blades. In 2019 Covestro announced they had successfully made and installed wind turbine blades with their polyurethane infusion resin that were 59.5 meters long. Covestro claims that their resins will reduce costs of wind turbine blades from a raw material standpoint and speed up production times due to the shorter cure times. Move over epoxy, your polyurethane cousin is coming for your spot light. 

In other polyurethane news Grace Nehls reported for CompositesWorld that Huntsman has debuted two new resin systems designed to speed up and simplify composite manufacturing for automotive and aerospace manufacturers. The Huntsman Polyurethanes composites team has combined two of their resins, Vitrox RTM and Rimlinr FC PU systems, for sandwich composite construction. 

If you do not know what a sandwich composite is then just think of an actual sandwich. The “bread slices” in this instance are usually continuous fiber composites or panels with high rigidity while the sandwich filling is some sort of low density and high rigidity core. Polyurethane foams can make great sandwich fillings not because they taste good, but because they can possess high rigidity, flame retardancy, and low density. 

PU foams are also typically produced via the “one-shot” method where the isocyanate side and the polyol/blowing agent side are injected and mixed at the same time into a mold. The two components rapidly polymerize and foam, which results in being able to expand to fill complex mold shapes. Other examples of sandwich composites would be a honeycomb composite, which are often resin impregnated honeycomb paper sandwiched between a carbon fiber composite rigid panel. 

The combination of Covestro gaining access to the wind turbine blade market with their polyurethane resin and Hunstman’s new system indicate to me that the polyurethane market has many opportunities to grow over the next few years as the composite market grows. Lightweight composite resins are crucial for increasing range on electric vehicles and increasing fuel efficiency in new internal combustion engine automobiles. They are probably in the spaceships that SpaceX is blowing up too. 

New Synthetic Routes to Cyanoacrylates (Superglue)

Michael McCoy reported for C&EN that Arkema is making progress in advancing cyanoacrylate chemistry. Cyanoacrylate is what chemistry people call superglue sort of how we might use the term PET for polyester. The term cyanoacrylate is non specific though, there are plenty of cyanoacrylate monomers out there, but few that are commercial. This is what we might call “commoditization of specialties," where lack of innovation or market needs on innovation lead to who can have the lowest price with the highest margin.

Cyanoacrylate chemistry has been relatively stagnant from a synthetic chemistry standpoint for the last 60 years and any recent advances have been in the form of formulation changes and or incremental tweaks to reactivity and viscosity. A few years ago a spinoff from Henkel named Afinitica set out to develop new routes to specialty cyanoacrylate monomers. McCoy reported:

Although Henkel and Afinitica cooperated for several years, Henkel ultimately decided not to pursue the crackless technology. Arkema, in contrast, saw in Afinitica an opportunity to get into the cyanoacrylate business as part of its overall goal to become a player in engineering adhesives, a category that also includes silicones, anaerobic adhesives, and epoxies. Arkema acquired Afinitica in 2018.

In January of this year, Arkema took a next step, forming a joint venture with the Taiwanese cyanoacrylate maker Cartell Chemical. The venture, in which Arkema has invested about $11 million, will build a plant at Cartell’s site in Taiwan to scale up the crackless technology. Desurmont says he expects it to open by the end of the year.

These are the types of developments in chemistry that to some might seem small on the surface, but have large potential. To me it represents that ambitious innovation is more viable outside of a large company. Afinitica was its own entity and it didn’t have to be beholden to risk averse institutional shareholders looking for a return on capital within the next year. Ramón Bacardit and his team formed Afinitica in 2013 and got their exit 5 years later in 2018. If Arkema acquires a polyurethane or epoxy resin formulator/producer in the next few years they could become a big player in the adhesives business. Arkema could tell Henkel bouge de là. Hopefully, Google Translate did that right.

Talk to you next week,

Tony