🏭 Immobilized for longer

Immobilizing with FabricNano, Carbios is licensing PET depolymerization, and acetylene.

April 10, 2023

TOGETHER WITH

Good morning. While The Column doesn’t exclusively cover sustainable chemical production, it’s definitely a core theme. If you’re interested, check out Feedstockland’s latest edition on how the physical state and location of raw materials can bottleneck sustainable chemical startups.

From the condenser:

· Immobilizing with FabricNano

· Carbios is licensing PET depolymerization

· MOTD: acetylene

BIOCATALYSIS

FabricNano and Sumitomo want to immobilize at scale

London-based biocatalyst startup, FabricNano, has announced their partnership with Sumitomo Chemical America to develop their first commercial scale process.

The background you need:

Enzymes are the holy grail of catalysis. They have the potential to achieve near-perfect selectivity (no by-products) and they do that at low temperatures (low operational cost and less heat-driven emissions). But historically we've ran into some issues: 1) we haven't been able to engineer useful enzymes, 2) we haven't been able to produce enzymes cheaply, 3) enzymes are usually inside of cells which requires additional separations, and 4) even when we get them out of the cells it has been expensive to reuse them and keep them functioning long enough for techno-economic process viability.

Okay, so what does FabricNano do?

With the advent of near instantaneous DNA synthesis for genes encoding enzymes, AI applied to enzyme structure (AlphaFold) and increasingly powerful bioinformatics for genome mining, the ability to find and engineer useful enzymes is now a mainstream toolset. But if we ever want to use those enzymes in a continuous process, we need to figure out how to get the most utility out of them (e.g. through re-use and stabilization), otherwise we'll be constantly paying for more cell mass that contains the enzymes (from a fermentation process). Like Novozymes, FabricNano immobilizes enzymes so they can be reused—the difference is that FabricNano has a data-driven approach that lets them quickly find ultra-stable immobilized enzyme biocatalysts that work on specific substrates.

Zooming out:

FabricNano has been working with Sumitomo for the last year, and this announcement is basically a signal that they're getting closer to a commodity-scale solution (it might be the first cell-free biocatalyst and commodity chemical agreement we've seen so far). Since rapid biocatalyst design and substrate matching is the core competency, it makes a lot of sense for FabricNano to become a technology or biocatalyst provider, not necessarily the world's next big chemical producer.

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PLASTIC RECYCLING

Carbios is ready to license PET recycling

Molecular recycling startup, Carbios, announced that it’s ready to start licensing its polyethylene terephthalate (PET) depolymerization process.

Some context:

PET is the polymer we use to make polyester clothing and most of our packaging. Its widespread use is what earned it the recycling number one. We make PET by reacting ethylene glycol (made from ethylene, from steam crackers) with terephalic acid (PTA) or dimethyl terephalate (DMT). Carbios is breaking down PET into its monomers (in this case, MEG and PTA) via immobilized enzymatic hydrolysis (using Novozyme’s biocatalyst).

The plan:

Carbios successfully ran its demonstration unit and is planning to start building a 50,000 ton per year recycling site with Indorama Ventures in 2025. But the capital intensive nature of chemical processing, a lot more plants can be built a lot faster by licensing their technology. So Carbios wants to package it up so any operator can run with it.

Bigger picture:

It's not just Carbios—we've also seen large chemical companies like Eastman make headway on the depolymerization of PET. Eastman is tackling the plastic waste issue with methanolysis (via a chemical process) and Carbios doing it with hydrolysis (via this immobilized enzymatic process). There are a lot of operational differences, but a key one to remember is their different outputs: the monomers Eastman end up with will be MEG and DMT, but Carbios will end up with MEG and PTA.

Some more headlines

  • Saint Gobain is making the world's first zero carbon plasterboard

  • Nova Chemicals just got a new CEO

  • TotalEnergies bought 30% of Iraq's Basrah Oil Company

  • HIF Global signed an agreement with Idemitsu Kosan to develop e-fuels

  • Solvay is collaborating with Ginkgo Bioworks

Molecule of The Day

Today's MOTD is the one and only… acetylene.

This highly reactive molecule's name deviates pretty far from IUPAC's desires (you saw it in organic chemistry as ethyne). When Edmund Davy discovered acetylene back in 1836 he figured it would be "admirably adapted for the purpose of artificial light, if it can be procured at a cheap rate.". It turns out that its useful for quite a bit more than that—the world now produces over 600,000 tons of acetylene each year (production had previously peaked in the mid-1960s).

Today, acetylene produced in the US, Western Europe, and Russia is primarily done by the partial oxidation of natural gas or as a steam cracker coproduct. In China, where the vast majority of acetylene is consumed, the molecule is produced by the old calcium carbide process. About 85%of the stuff is used to make vinyl chloride monomer(used to make PVC), vinyl acetate monomer (used to make PVAc, and 1,4-Butanediol(which often becomes spandex). The main companies churning out all this acetylene are Linde, Air Liquide, Sinopec, Jinhong Gas, and many more.

The reboiler

  • Book: You need to understand the forces behind the oil industry to understand the chemical industry. Daniel Yergin's The New Map does a great job breaking it down.*

  • Safety Moment: With winter coming, freezes at chemical plants are inevitable. Learn about how improper winterization can lead to process safety events.

  • Podcast: Check out this episode about a BASF trainee working as a process engineer.

The bottoms

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