ACS-BIO ’04: Oil costs will drive chemicals to biomass

28 October 2004 21:42  [Source: ICIS news]

McLEAN, Virginia (CNI)--Chemical manufacturers will be obliged to turn increasingly to biomass-based production as oil and natural gas feedstock costs continue to climb, a leading industrial biomass official said here Thursday.

 

James Stoppert, senior director for industrial bio-products at Cargill, told a joint biotech and chemicals conference here that “as the cost of oil and gas has risen over the years, the chemical industry has done a great job in improving the efficiency of their processes, but they’ve gone about as far as they can go with those improvements and now they are going to be slaves to the cost of oil.”

 

In contrast, said Stoppert, the cost of biomass feedstocks for chemical production have remained flat or have fallen over the past 20 years, and he predicted that the cost of major biomass feedstocks, such as corn, will decline going forward as agricultural yield per acre continues to climb.

 

Speaking to the first day here of the two-day ACS-BIO CTO conference, Stoppert noted that even as biomass feedstock costs remain stable or decline, the efficiencies of biomass conversions continue to improve and consequently moderate in cost.

 

The ACS-BIO CTO conference is co-sponsored by the American Chemical Society (ACS) and the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) and brings together chief technology officers (CTOs) and other senior executives of the biotech and chemicals industries.

 

Stoppert also pointed out that biomass feedstocks - corn, soybeans, wheat and other crops - are more broadly available worldwide than oil and natural gas, meaning that biomass-based products and energy will not be prey to the kind of fluctuations in price and availability that plague products and energy generation based on isolated or concentrated resources such as Saudi Arabian oil reserves.

 

He noted that Cargill’s joint venture biomass-based chemicals business with Dow Chemical, a 140 000 tonne/year polylactic acid (PLA) plant at Blair, Nebraska, uses only 0.5% of the annual available US corn crop, and that all of the Blair plant’s biomass feedstock comes from within 70 miles of the plant.

 

But Stoppert said the developing merger of biomass and chemicals needs a higher level of government funding “to mitigate the risks and accelerate the process.”  He also told the approximately 80 industry and government officials here that more alliances are needed between biomass companies such as Wayzata, Minnesota-based Cargill and chemical industry firms.

 

“Neither one of us can do this alone,” he said.

 

The ACS-BIO CTO conference continues through Friday.  Both BIO and ACS are based in Washington, DC.

By: Joe Kamalick
+1 713 525 2653

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