🏭 The Column: November 15, 2024

Good morning. Today we’re talking a bit about making nylon 6,6 from muconic acid, Vulcan Energy’s geothermal lithium hydroxide plant, and Shell’s new pyrolysis pre-treatment unit.

Things Happened:

Bio-based nylon 6,6 from muconic acid

We make around 3,700 KT of the world’s second most popular polyamide, nylon 6,6, each year. Roughly half of this stuff is molded into engineering thermoplastics (think radiator end tanks, air intake manifolds, and oil pans) and roughly half is converted into fibers for textiles (think airbags, luggage, some apparel, and carpets)—but all of it is made via the polycondensation of two petrochemicals: hexamethylenediamine (HMD) and adipic acid. Due to its widespread and high value use, more sustainable routes to HMD and adipic acid are heavily sought after, and now Japan’s Toray and Thailand’s PTTGC are getting into it. The two companies want to valorize Thailand’s agricultural waste (which you can think of as cellulose) by fermenting it to make muconic acid, which Toray would then hydrogenate to adipic acid and feed into its existing nylon 6,6 production. Ultimately the bottleneck here is the fermentation step, but perhaps PTTGC is seeing high selectivity and conversion to muconic acid, and perhaps its hydrogenation to adipic acid is relatively trivial. [LINK]

Vulcan’s new lithium hydroxide plant

In case you haven’t noticed, the demand for EVs, and therefore batteries and their raw materials, is rising dramatically. Those batteries are made from hundreds of components and dozens of materials, but lithium, in the form of lithium hydroxide, tends to steal the spotlight because of the central role it plays in the cathode. Most of that new lithium capacity is going to be extracted from subsurface brines, but a fraction of those brines are hot enough (because of their proximity to geothermal activity) to produce power. That’s what Vulcan Energy is up to—and now, 3 years after their geothermal lithium pilot plant started up, they are officially producing lithium hydroxide from lithium-containing hot brine in central Europe at a rate of 24 KTA. [LINK]

Shell’s new pyrolysis pre-treatment unit

Over the last 5 years we’ve seen an explosion of interest in the recycling of waste plastic from the world’s largest plastic producers. Given their existing asset base, most of these plastic producers are interested in pyrolysis oil (which is mostly depolymerized mixed plastic waste) because it can be fed back into the same hydrocrackers that make monomers like ethylene and propylene (which are used to make virgin plastics). But utilizing pyrolysis oil is problematic because it’s typically contaminated with sulfur, nitrogen, oxygen, halogens, and metals, and these contaminants poison hydrocracking catalysts. So, to remove those contaminants, Shell just installed a “market development upgrader”, which I suspect is a hydrotreating unit filled with a nickel- and cobalt-based catalyst from Haldor Topsoe. [LINK]

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Other Things Happened:

Haldor Topsoe is providing its hydrotreating catalysts for a new SAF plant in Brazil. Evonik broke ground on its new specialty amine plant in Nanjing. Nouryon completed its organic peroxide expansion in China. Indorama acquired Cargill’s oil and gas production processing aid business. Trinseo is licensing its polycarbonate process to a company in India. Linde and NEO Battery Materials are trying to scale up a silicon anode manufacturing technology. BASF is investing in its 3D printing-based catalyst shaping technology to bring it to commercial scale.