ACS-BIO ’04: Biomass awaits a major chemical player

28 October 2004 19:18  [Source: ICIS news]

McLEAN, Virginia (CNI)--The technology and market for biomass-based chemicals have both advanced to the stage where a major chemical company could take the technology to a commercial level, biotech officials said here Thursday.

Jack Huttner, vice president for communications and public affairs at biotech firm Genencor, said that the phaseout of methyl tertiary butyl ether (MTBE) in the US in recent years has made a major contribution to market development for biomass-based chemicals, even if that market advance is for the most part limited to ethanol.

 

Concurrent advances in biomass-based chemical technology, Huttner said, also have been made in the last few years to the point where biomass technology is ready to meet its market.  “It only remains,” said Huttner, “for a major chemical company to make the capital investment for the first commercial-level bio refinery.”

 

Huttner was speaking on the sidelines of the second annual ACS-BIO CTO biotech-chemical conference.  Sponsored by the American Chemical Society (ACS) and the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO), the conference brings together chief technology officers (CTO) and other top executives from the biotech and chemical industries.

 

Huttner said advances in cellulose-based chemical production have accelerated in the last two years.  “We have seen a 20-fold increase in improvements in the efficiency and cost of these processes,” he said.

 

“Now the real challenge is to get these processes into the real world, the commercial world,” he added.  One problem to be overcome is the lack of a national infrastructure for the collection and transportation of agricultural waste streams needed to build the quantities needed for commercial production of biomass-based chemicals.

 

“But the technology for enzyme catalysis is now to the point where it is commercially viable,” Huttner said.  “The question is, which major chemicals company is going to step forward to make the large capital investment necessary for the first major biorefinery?”

 

Huttner said the value of this two-day ACS-BIO CTO conference “is to make major chemical firms aware of the state of technical readiness in biomass-based chemicals production.”

 

Genencor is based in Rochester, New York.  Both BIO and ACS are based in Washington, DC.  BIO counts some 1200 firms among its membership.  ACS has nearly 160 000 individual members throughout the chemicals industry.

By: Joe Kamalick
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