Rise of the chemical plant

Date: 19-jun-2009
Author: Jon Evans

With all the fuss over liquid biofuels, the fact that plant biomass can also potentially be converted into a range of industrial chemicals is often forgotten. This is particularly surprising seeing as not only can the same production processes be used to generate liquid biofuels and industrial chemicals, but often the liquid biofuels and industrial chemicals are one and the same.

At the moment, most industrial chemicals, particularly plastics, are generated from petroleum. ‘Right now, about 5% of the world’s supply of petroleum is used to make feedstocks that are synthesised into commodity chemicals,’ says Jonathan Ellman, a chemistry professor at the University of California, Berkeley. ‘If these feedstocks can instead be made from biomass they become renewable and their production will no longer be a detriment to the environment.’

Indeed, a case can be made that converting plant biomass to chemicals may be a more efficient use of limited plant resources than converting them into biofuels. For biofuels such as ethanol and biodiesel are in many ways inferior to fossil fuels, whereas the chemicals produced from plant biomass should be direct replacements for petroleum-derived chemicals.

Furthermore, in response to the volatile oil price of the past few years, chemical companies are taking a growing interest in chemicals derived from plant biomass. In a report released at the end of last year, the UK market analyst firm Frost & Sullivan predicted that the global market for biorenewable chemicals would increase from $1.63 billion in 2008 to over $5 billion by 2015.

Ethanol, as well as being the world’s favourite biofuel, is already an industrial chemical, acting as a feedstock in the production of various other organic chemicals, such as diethyl ether. But scientists are working on ways to transform plant biomass into other chemical compounds that can act as both a liquid biofuel and a chemical feedstock. One of the most promising of these compounds is 5-hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF), which can act as a feedstock in the production of polyesters, including the polyethylene terephthalate used to make most plastic bottles, and synthetic diesel.

Over the past few years, a number of research groups have come up with various ways to produce HMF from glucose and fructose, and more recently from cellulose (see Biofuels of tomorrow). In 2007, scientists at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, led by Conrad Zhang, reported using the metal catalyst chromium chloride dissolved in an ionic liquid to convert glucose to HMF.

Ionic liquids are also able to break down cellulose and so Zhang and his colleagues wondered whether a variation of this method could produce HMF directly from cellulose. They managed to come up with such a method by simply dissolving small amounts of two metal catalysts – chromium chloride and copper chloride – into the ionic liquid, with this method able to convert 57% of the sugar content in cellulose into HMF in a single step. They reported this advance in a recent paper in Applied Catalysis A and also at a meeting of the North American Catalysis Society (NACS) at the beginning of June.

Other scientists are discovering that the major by-product of biodiesel production, glycerol, can also be converted into a range of useful chemicals. For instance, scientists at the US operations of the German chemical company Sud-Chemie have developed catalytic processes for converting glycerol into a wide range of industrial chemicals, including acetone and propanol. They also presented their work at the recent NACS meeting.

Most recently, Ellman and his colleagues at Berkeley developed an efficient way to convert glycerol into allyl alcohol, which is a major feedstock used in the production of pesticides, drugs and various polymers and organic chemicals. To do this, they simply mixed glycerol with formic acid, which gives bee venom its sting, at around 235°C.

Ordinarily, this reaction is not very productive, because it also produces a lot of unwanted compounds. But Ellman and his colleagues found that they could eliminate these unwanted compounds by passing a stream of nitrogen through the reaction mixture, improving the allyl alcohol yield by 80%.

Does all this indicate that plant biomass may soon have more to offer to the chemical sector than to the transport sector?

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Descripción del curso

Código: 2270170003670
Asignatura: Ingeniería Bioquímica
Unidades Créditos: 4

Este curso abarca aspectos de bioquímica, biología celular y molecular, química orgánica e inorgánica, y tiene como base estructural los principios fundamentales de la Ingeniería Química.

De una manera simple, podría decirse que la Ingeniería Bioquímica envuelve el uso de organismos vivos o parte de ellos en el desarrollo de nuevos procesos y en la producción de metabolitos y compuestos químicos. Una definición mas práctica y amplia es la aplicación de los principios de la ingeniería para diseñar, desarrollar y analizar procesos usando biocatalizadores.

Los bioprocesos son una parte esencial en muchas industrias químicas, alimenticias y farmacéuticas. Las operaciones en bioprocesos hacen uso de células microbiales, animales y vegetales y de componentes de estas células, tales como enzimas, proteínas, etc., para manufacturar nuevos productos y también para destruir peligrosos desechos. El uso de microorganismos y materiales biológicos en la producción de alimentos fermentados tiene sus orígenes en la antigüedad. Desde entonces, los bioprocesos se han desarrollado para un gran rango de productos comerciales, que van desde materiales poco costosos tales como los provenientes de la industria del alcohol y solventes orgánicos, hasta compuestos químicos especialmente costosos como antibióticos, vacunas, proteínas terapéuticas y otros fármacos.

El objetivo de este curso es proporcionar al estudiante una apreciación global del fascinante campo de biotecnología y el papel del profesional, sea Ingeniero, Biologo o Químico en estas nuevas tecnologías. El estudiante tendrá la oportunidad de:

• Demostrar cómo usar las ecuaciones y parámetros importantes de diseño en la práctica de la Ingeniería Bioquímica, incluyendo discusiones de tópicos tales como cinética enzimática y biocatálisis, crecimiento microbial y formación de producto, diseño de bioreactores, transporte y recuperación de productos.
• Explicar y aplicar las técnicas y conceptos básicos de la biología molecular en la producción de productos derivados microbiológicamente.
• Aplicar los principios básicos de ingeniería química, tales como balance de materiales, cinética de reacciones, fenómenos de transporte y procesos de separación en la comprensión del cultivo celular o problemas biológicos.
• Entender los mecanismos de cómo una droga intercepta una enfermedad, por ejemplo, interfiriendo con la trascripción de los genes de las células o inhibiendo las enzimas asociadas con la enfermedad
• Familiarizarse con las etapas del proceso de fabricación de drogas y fármacos
• Familiarizarse con las características de ciertos tipos de cultivos que permiten obtener productos específicos.
• Familiarizarse con los tipos de productos producidos por cultivo celular o microbiano, por ejemplo, proteínas, antibióticos, enzimas.
• Caracterizar y optimizar el crecimiento de un cultivo celular y la producción de un producto deseado
• Seleccionar el método de cultivo apropiado y las condiciones de operación la producción de un determinado producto por cultivo celular
• Seleccionar el tipo de bioreactor apropiado y las condiciones de operación la producción de un determinado producto por cultivo celular
• Considerar las etapas del proceso de recuperación y purificación de un determinado producto obtenido por cultivo celular

TEMA 1: Que es la Ingeniería Bioquímica?

La Ingeniería Bioquímica consiste en la aplicación de los principios de Ingeniería al diseño, desarrollo y analisis de procesos usando BIOCATALIZADORES, bien sea para la obtención de productos deseados o para eliminar sustancias no deseadas o peligrosas.

Chemurgy

Better living through chemurgy
June 26th 2008 / NEW YORK
From The Economist print edition

Efforts to replace oil-based chemicals with renewable alternatives are taking off

FORTY years ago Dustin Hoffman’s character in “The Graduate” was given a famous piece of career advice:“Just one word…plastics.” It was appropriate at the time, given that the 1960s were a golden age of petrochemical innovation. Oil was cheap and seemed limitless. Since then, scientists have kept on coming up with wondrous new products made from petroleum that helped to ensure, in the words of one corporate slogan, better living through chemistry. Even so, someone offering advice to today’s promising graduates might invoke a different, uglier word: chemurgy.

This term, coined in the 1930s, refers to a branch of applied chemistry that turns agricultural feedstocks into industrial and consumer products. It had several successes early in the 20th century. Cellulose was used to make everything from paint brushes to the film on which motion pictures were captured. George Washington Carver, an American scientist, developed hundreds of ways to convert peanuts, sweet potatoes and other crops into glue, soaps, paints, dyes and other industrial products. In the 1930s Henry Ford started using parts made from agricultural materials, and even built an all-soy car. But the outbreak of the second world war and the shift to wartime production halted his experiment. After the war, low oil prices and breakthroughs in petrochemical technologies ensured the dominance of petroleum-based plastics and chemicals.

But now chemurgy is back with a vengeance, in the shape of modern industrial biotechnology. Advances in bioengineering, environmental worries, high oil prices and new ways to improve the performance of oil-based products using biotechnology have led to a revival of interest in using agricultural feedstocks to make plastics, paints, textile fibres and other industrial products that now come from oil.

This form of biotechnology has not attracted as much attention as biotech drugs, genetically modified organisms or biofuels, but it has been quietly growing for years. BASF, a German chemical giant, estimates that bio-based products account for some €300m ($470m) of sales in such things as “chiral intermediates” (which give the kick to its pesticides). The sale of industrial enzymes by Novozymes, a Danish firm, brings in over €950m a year, about a third of it from enzymes for improving laundry detergents. Jens Riese of McKinsey, a consultancy, reckons industrial biotech’s global sales will soar to $100 billion by 2011—by which time sales of biofuels will have reached only $72 billion.

Will this boom really prove to be more sustainable than the first, ill-fated blossoming of chemurgy? One potential problem is that oil-based polymers are very good at what they do. Early bioplastics melted too easily, or proved unable to keep soft drinks fizzy when they were made into bottles. Pat Gruber, a green-chemistry guru who helped start NatureWorks (a pioneering biopolymers firm) says customers are sometimes too risk-averse to retrain staff or modify equipment to accept a new biopolymer—even if it is cheaper or better.

It seems likely that oil-based products will be around for a long time in some applications. But the big advances in oil-based polymers happened decades ago, whereas the number of patents granted for industrial biotechnology now exceeds 20,000 per year. Such is the pace of innovation, says Tjerk de Ruiter, chief executive of Genencor, a industrial-biotech firm that is now a division of Denmark’s Danisco, that processes that once took five years now take just one. And Steen Riisgaard, the boss of Novozymes, insists that new technologies can indeed push old ones out of the way, provided they are clearly superior (and not just greener). Brewers raced to adopt Novozymes’ novel enzymes, for example, in order to cash in on the Atkins Diet craze with “low carb” beers.

A second potential obstacle is that incumbent companies will quash the fledgling new technologies. But concern about oil’s reliability as a feedstock means that even oil-dependent incumbents are interested in alternatives. Oil companies such as Royal Dutch Shell and BP see novel bioproducts not as threats but as useful tools for blending into, and possibly extending, remaining oil reserves. And chemicals giants such as Dow and DuPont are also big fans of novel industrial biotechnologies. Chad Holliday, DuPont’s boss, is sure that Sorona, his firm’s new biofibre, will be a multi-billion dollar product and “the next nylon”. DuPont expects its sales of industrial biotechnology products to grow by 16-18% a year, to reach $1 billion by 2012.

Perhaps the biggest worry is that today’s industrial-biotech boom is an artefact of the soaring price of oil. If the oil price plunged and stayed low, the boom would surely turn to bust. Short of outright collapse, however, even a sharp price drop need not burst the biotech bubble. Mr Riese has scrutinised the economics of sugar and oil—the chief rival feedstocks—and concludes that the “bio-route” will be cheaper even at an oil price of $50-60 a barrel. Brent Erickson of BIO, an industry lobby, argues that “this was happening long before the oil-price spike—$100 oil is just gravy.” Industry bosses agree, noting that the flurry of projects now approaching commercial use were deemed viable and initiated a few years ago, when the oil price was closer to $40 a barrel.

For proof that industrial biotech is ready for the big time, look to Brazil. The country already has a large and efficient industry producing ethanol fuel from sugar cane. Now rival consortia are rushing to build plants to turn sugar cane into bioethylene. This is striking. Unlike many other industrial biotech efforts which target niche markets, this is an assault on the $114 billion market for ethylene, the most widely produced organic compound of all.

Erin O’Driscoll of Dow, a chemical giant now investing in Brazilian bioethylene, says the firm is confident the technology is ready for commercialisation. The chief reason for such optimism is that industrial biotechnology is better and cheaper than it was back in the heyday of chemurgy. Dow has even come up with a material made from soyabean oil that it plans to sell to carmakers to replace oil-based foam. Ford and his friend Carver would be proud.


Illustration by David Simonds
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