The Future of Composites is...

Green Chemistry and Circular Plastics + Specialty Chemicals July Issue

Welcome to a special combined edition of green chemistry and circular polymers and speciality chemicals issue of the newsletter. Here are a few big stories that I think happened since the last issues were out in June.

Source

Neste and LyondellBasell have agreed on long-term commercial relationship to make polymers and chemicals from renewable feedstock more widely available. The Finnish oil giant has developed a renewable feedstock from waste oil and fats called Neste RE™ and LyondellBasell has agreed to crack this into what they call Circulen Renew polymers. The Circulen family is purported to be from feedstocks that are either renewable, recovered, or revived from existing waste feedstocks (chemical recycling). Essentially, LyondellBasell are able to make ethylene and propylene from the Neste RE™ product, which unlocks downstream viability for other monomers and polymers—not just polyethylene and polypropylene.

This sounds amazing to me, but perhaps I’m biased by being in the industry. I think having as many routes to ethylene and propylene that are not reliant on cracking refined oil is important for a circular economy future. I think what Neste is doing here is also what the shareholders at ExxonMobil in the Engine No. 1 camp would like to see happen. Having alternative revenue streams

Doris Guzman recently reported on two new bio-based chemical plants being planned for Green Chemicals Blog. The first is a 65 kiloton per annum fermentation plant for butane diol (BDO), which is used in a variety of applications including making polyurethanes. A company named Qore is planning on building out the capacity for the bio-based BDO in Iowa, which it has licensed from Genomatica. NatureWorks is planning a 65 kiloton per annum plant for polylactide (PLA) in Thailand which will likely be producing their Inego branded polylactide.

In a sort of circular materials and specialty materials hybrid story I saw that Siemens Gamesa is aiming for a fully recyclable wind turbine blade by 2030. I’ve written about wind turbines previously for the newsletter and about epoxy resins used for wind turbine manufacturing and the potential future polyurethanes from Covestro. In graduate school I was interviewing for a role at Hexcel Corporation in Dublin CA and they were asking me what I thought the future of composites was in 2016 and I told them I thought it was going to be recycling composites for the high value glass and carbon fiber. Needless to say, Hexcel got back to me months later after I had already started working a different job and in reading this story from Siemens Gamesa I felt the need to say, “I told you so,” but the guy who interviewed probably thought I was a quacky academic at the time.

There were some indications to signal that I was probably onto something with this whole recycling of composites though. There was a start-up called Recyclamine out there that was making diamines (epoxy crosslinkers) capable of degrading under acidic conditions (acetals/hemiacetals), which enabled a thermosetting polymer to become a thermoplastic. I’ll need to write something to explain the difference here in detail sometime in the future, but one melts (thermoplastic) and thermosets do not. Connora Technologies originally developed the technology and was acquired by Indian epoxy resin producer Aditya Birla Chemicals in 2019.

Jim Hendrick’s group at IBM also published a paper on an amine-paraformaldehyde based polymer that degrades under strong acids. I remember that Jeannette M. García presented on her and her coworker’s work in 2014 at ACS San Francisco when I was a graduate student attending my first ACS National Conference. I would later publish a paper on alkaline degradable epoxy resins in Green Chemistry just before I graduated. 

My purpose in telling this anecdote is really to illustrate that Siemens Gamesa’s plans are not that crazy considering these technologies of recycling thermosets have been around for almost 10 years at this point and the concept has been around for longer. I think the future I predicted in that interview almost 6 years ago wasn’t that crazy either. Whichever company figures out a thermoset degradation on command technology should win a serious amount of business from composites producers in the next 20-30 years because there will be a value in those renewable energy assets when wind turbine blades need to be replaced, which will help lower the maintenance cost of wind energy, and further enable financing of those types of deals (I think).

On the rest of the specialty chemicals side of things nothing to me is standing out right now except that we are still dealing with massive supply chain disruptions including availability of shipping containers, ships, trucks, and raw material inflation. I’ll be writing a quarterly chemicals outlook in the next few weeks as all of the reports come in, but 2021 has been a slog of combating inflation for most specialty chemical users and producers.

I anticipate record profits for most specialty and commodity chemical producers due to being able to command higher prices than normal because of raw material scarcity and record demand. Sources of mine report that low cost of labor manufacturing operations in places such as India and Philippines have been severely impacted by Covid-19’s variants and has resulted in overall reduced capacity for everything from chemicals to plastics. I do not think we will see plans to “on-shore” capacity here in North America anytime soon as I think many of the financiers in chemicals see Covid-19 as something that is ending and that a new virus will likely not do this to us again (hey, Delta variant). 

I’ll return to the regular schedule next month. 

Tony