🏭 The Column: February 28, 2025

Good morning. Right now I’m enjoying just writing a single blurb that has a bit more detail than three with less detail, so I’m going to stick with it for a while. Today we’re talking about two very different go-to-market strategies for replacing an endocrine disrupting surfactant.

Things Happened:

Rhamnolipids at scale

Surfactants are known for having a love hate relationship with water, which makes them great at stabilizing mixtures that would otherwise be unstable, so you’ll typically find them as ingredients in formulations with specific applications. In a basic formulation, like your dishwasher detergent, you’ll probably find one or two uncharged surfactants (usually sodium lauryl sulfate or sodium laureth sulfate). But for more complex formulations, like a hair mask, you’ll find other charged surfactants and salts that only play well when you’ve got an alkylphenol ethoxylate (APEO) mixed in there too. Unfortunately, APEOs are surfactants that break down into endocrine disrupting alkylphenols, which is why Evonik is trying to commercialize rhamnolipids (these are biosurfactants made via fermentation that perform similarly to APEOs). But Evonik’s new plant isn’t what brought rhamnolipids to my attention this time—it was an announcement from AGAE (a small scale rhamnolipid producer) saying that they built a much smaller plant (less than 10% of Evonik’s capacity) in Asia. AGAE’s go-to-market strategy is very different from Evonik’s, but I don’t know if it’s because Evonik has actually developed a more cost-effective way of producing rhamnolipids at scale, or if AGAE just lacks the reputation, relationships, and capital required to wiggle your way into CPG formulations. It’s hard to see a world where AGAE is able to work closely with Unilever for a decade, and then raise the hundreds of millions of dollars needed to build a plant large enough to replace an APEO in a single product line. So instead Evonik is working that angle, and AGAE is becoming their own channel to market and integrating downstream with their brand MayLu. [LINK]

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Other Things Happened:

Zeon decided to pause their plans to build a lithium-ion binder plant. Lotte is starting up a new cracker in Indonesia in May. Someone in the nylon value chain just sold to private equity firm Lone Star. Cornerstone is shutting down their acrylonitrile plant. LyondellBasell just secured some feedstock from Saudi Arabia. KBR is going to build that first urea plant in Angola. Multi-layer PET film producer, Evertis, is building a $100m plant in South Carolina. Arkema is expanding its PVDF production in Kentucky.