Resisting Commodification of Specialties
The October Specialty Chemical Issue
Welcome to the October Specialty Chemicals Issue. If you have no idea what specialty chemicals are then start here. One thing that has been happening over the last few years has been commodification of specialty chemicals such as epoxy resins, polyurethanes, and rubbers. I think we may be starting to see a change though as sustainability and circularity become more important to the public. This issue is a deeper look into how specialty chemicals can resist the forces of commodification. Hint: It’s investing early and often and in new category creating products. The Polymerist Is Presented By:
I saw someone post a story on LinkedIn earlier this week about wind turbine blade landfills via Bloomberg. There were a lot of comments about how wind turbines are greenwashing, we don’t know the environmental impacts, and blah blah blah. If you really want to start understanding the impacts of erecting wind turbines to replace coal and natural gas plants then read some life cycle assessments. Here is an LCA from 2006 for 2-3 MW turbines for both onshore and offshore. Here is an LCA from 2020 on wind turbine blade recycling versus landfilling. Here is another LCA from 2014.
The one quibble I have with the Bloomberg article is in the title of wind turbine blades not being able to be recycled. We can recycle composites, but recycling them via crushing them into smaller pieces and then feeding those pieces into a different process can be done. For instance we could use wind turbine pieces to build roads just like we do with recycled roofing shingles. The author of the Bloomberg article starts us off by making it seem crazy or difficult to dismantle a wind turbine blade.
First, you need to saw through the lissome fiberglass using a diamond-encrusted industrial saw to create three pieces small enough to be strapped to a tractor-trailer
Guess what, we cut through steel all day every day here in the US to build bridges, skyscrapers, and cars using diamond encrusted saws. You can buy saws that have diamonds in them from Home Depot: $20 for a 10 pack. The diamond saws used to cut wind turbine blades are not the same as what would be used at home, but my point is that there isn’t necessarily a scarcity of diamond saw blades out there. Our society has been racing to install more wind turbine blades and to drive costs down and the companies that make and operate wind turbine blades are aware of the sustainability challenges.
Companies are looking to recycle or reprocess wind turbine blades now and they are making progress. Vattenfall has set a goal to recycle all of their blades by 2030. GE signed an agreement with Veolia to do cement kiln processing of wind turbine blades. This Fast Company article from September 2021 is about Siemens Gamesa’s RecyclableBlade:
the company’s latest innovation, called the RecyclableBlade, is made with a new type of resin that can be “efficiently separate[d]” from the other components of the blade at the end of its use. Those materials can then be reused.
It’s taken me a bit to get to my point but it’s a new resin, a specialty chemical, that can be efficiently separated from the other components of the blade at the end of use. Most wind turbine blades are about 80% glass or carbon fiber with 20% epoxy resin. The epoxy resin sticks very well when cured to the woven fiber matts and separation of these two materials has been really difficult. I even worked on a resin system in graduate school that would enable easier separation of resin from fiber.
Speaking of graduate school I think the most stressed out I’ve ever been in my life was near the end of graduate school when I was applying to jobs, writing papers, finishing up experiments, and did I mention trying to get a job? Getting that first job out of graduate school is tough and I wish I had been working with recruiters like my sponsor Task Force Talent. Even if you already have a job in the chemical industry I think its worth having a few good relationships with some key recruiters. If you don’t know how modern recruiting works check out this FAQ.
The problem with epoxy resins right now is that they are highly commodified. Just about anyone can make an epoxy resin if they have a bunch of bisphenol A (BPA), epichlorohydrin, and can purify it at scale. Epoxy resins from BPA is relatively old technology that has been built off of phenol via the cumene process and it all got invented in the 1940s-1950s. Epoxy resins by themselves are useless without a crosslinker or hardener, the second part, which transforms them from liquid to an intractable solid that is resistant to most things.
There is a chance for new to the world epoxy resins though and for epoxy resins to regain their true specialty character again for wind turbine blades. Most large chemical companies that deal in epoxy resins don’t have the R&D capacity and/or talent to bring a completely new to the world technology to market. In looking closer at the RecyclableBlade technology I found this Composites World article and here is the key phrase:
combined with a new resin that has been designed to dissolve in a reportedly mild, efficient recycling process at the end of the blade’s service life. The company says this process and resin protects the properties of the blade reinforcement materials, and allow them to be reused or recycled into new applications after separation from the resin.
The key word here is “dissolve” and there was only one company that I was aware that was able to do this at scale, which was Connora Technologies’ hemiacetal and acetal crosslinkers. Connora Technologies was acquired by Aditya Birla Chemicals in 2019 for their Recyclamine technology. The heart of Connora’s technology when I read their patent back in 2015 was that their epoxy resin crosslinkers were susceptible to degradation under acidic conditions. They had demonstrated viability of their technology by putting a fully formed composite into acidic environments resulting in the resin essentially dissolving away from the fibers.
When the mild acidic process was finished the fibers could be collected and reused and the thermoset resin became a thermoplastic, which could then be reprocessed into something else. The real specialty chemical here for Aditya Birla is the crosslinker and this is what will enable them to charge a premium for their recyclable epoxy resin composite systems and push their profits to be higher than what Olin, Hexion, or Huntsman can achieve.
I’d bet a few dollars that the Siemens Gamesa RecycableBlade technology is based on an epoxy crosslinker developed in the mid 2010s by some talented people who sold their company to a large chemical company. I suspect that Aditya Birla is the supplier to Siemens even though there is no mention as to who makes this fancy new specialty resin with the potential to keep wind turbine blades out of landfills.
It takes years for a new specialty chemical product to gain market acceptance and approval into something like a wind turbine blade, but when it does happen it can be a healthy revenue generator for the chemical producer.
I just interviewed a chemical industry executive yesterday for a future careers issue of this newsletter and we had a great conversation. We discussed that many specialty chemical companies have become lean in that they don’t have a lot of people supporting their business in order to maintain their margins. I made a joke a while ago about how it’s not sustainable for a company to cost-cut their way to better profitability. Specialty chemical producers should be thinking about how to create new product categories that realize the sustainability goals that consumers want and the companies that had the foresight to invest in these technologies 10+ years ago during a global recession should be seeing the dividends of that investment.
The rest of us are trying to catch up and asking ourselves, “Why didn’t we do that?”
Tony
If you liked this newsletter check out some of the previous issues:
I agree with your view on the article and when I read it had some of the same thoughts. Many things that last 20 years or so are tough to recycle. Of course, the other direction for increasing the LCA is to increase the life as I am not convinced reusing 20 year old carbon or glass fiber would work in windmills and it might need to be down cycled. I love your posts—I spent much of my career working to keep speciality polymers specialty.