Lucite Process for Methacrylate from Ethylene

Strangely these "Lucite" PMMA plastic items were trendy
fashion pieces in 2010. 

Lucite has developed a process, called "Alpha" for making methacrylic monomers from ethylene. (Lucite is owned by Mitsubishi Rayon.) This is significant because ethylene can be made from many sources including bioderived sources like sugar cane ethanol.

Construction of such a plant was started in Singapore in 2008.   This plant uses syngas to make ethylene, which is dimerized, carboxylated and esterified to make methyl propionate, and then reduced to make MMA methyl methacrylate.

This is interesting because it is difficult to find renewable substitutes to methacrylates.

This is important since butylene has surged in price while ethylene has stayed cheap -- due to new natural gas supplies.  By dimerizing ethylene they get around that.

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More on the Singapore plant which makes 120,000,000 kg/yr and is 30-40% cheaper to make and run. It uses ethylene, carbon dioxide and methanol.