BioAcrylic Projects

The shortages in propylene and acrylic acid have kept BioAcrylic at top of mind. Let's get an update.

3-hydroxy propionic acid is easily
deydrated to make acrylic acid.

In addition to the OPX Biotechnology-Dow project that is at pilot scale, there are multiple industrial projects to make bioacrylics.  If you have not heard, OPX Biotechnology is looking to build a $35 million pilot plant for its fermentation based process to acrylic acid via the dehydration of 3-hydroxy propionic acid. Dow is jointly developing this, and OPX says they have a 3-5 year agreement with Dow. [See my previous post on OPX; see update from ICIS.]

OPX is looking to build a full scale plant in 2015.


All four projects go through the intermediate 3-hydroxy propionic acid. There are three other bioacylic projects according to OPX's Eggert, Cargill/Novozymes, Nippon Shokubai/Arkema, and Metabolix.

Cargill/Novozymes

The Cargill/Novozymes are licensing the DOE's technology using 3-hydroxypropionic acid, which is made from genetically engineered bacteria.

In bacterial processes, one should not underestimate the cost of separating the 3-hydroxy propionic acid from all the other acids present in a cell.

Novozymes in 2010 saw themselves growing to 18% market share in the US acrylic market, and are "planning" three plants.  Truthfully these are pretty vague plans so they may not happen.

Novozymes is claiming 48 hour growth cycles on the bacteria, 95% recovery of the 3-hydroxy propionic acid from the medium, and 98% yield on the dehydration of the hydroxy acid to acrylic acid.

Finally, Novozymes claims that their product is competes with US production with a petroleum price of $65/barrel. With oil at $100, it should be economical. Note that bioacrylics in Brasil is cheaper, and that is because the glycose is cheaper there.

Since acrylic acid can be made from petroleum or from glucose, this technology constitutes a way to tie the two markets together. Novozymes made this graph to show that. This uses acrylic production, but the larger volume ethanol production is the primary tie between the markets.




Nippon Shokubai/Arkema


In 2009, Nippon Shokubai had a lab scale process for dehydration of glycerin to acrolein, and had announced construction of a pilot scale plant. Acrolein is converted to acrylic acid by conventional oxidation, just as convention plants do today. The pilot plant was to cost $2 billion, and be funded by New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization or NEDO, and it is majority funded by the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI.) There are no recent press reports on this.  Arkema licenses technology in the US, and they joint own plants; they appear to be putting in the technology to make glycerin from rapeseed oil.

Metabolix


Metabolix make polyhydroxyl alkanoates PHA today, and they claim that their technology is a superior way to make 3-hydroxy propionic acid. They propose to take the crude PHA and cleave and hydrate it in one step to make acrylic acid directly. An advantage of the PHA route is that the PHA is easily separated from the rest of the cell. In fact it is not really necessary to kill the cells to harvest the PHA plastic.  The yield may be 90% according to Metabolix.  See also.

Metabolix says that their process is economical with oil at $90-100/gal. They say they could make butane diol just as easily.

It will be interesting to see who commercializes what first.

There has been work at making acrylic acid from lactic acid, which is 2-hydroxy propionic acid. The problem with that is that it frequently decarboxylates to give acetaldehyde as a side product. There has been lots of work on catalysts and processes to keep that under control. One promising route uses nanoscale phosphated zeolites.