Ceres and Rohm and Haas Collaborate to Develop Methacrylate Monomers from Cellulosic Ethanol Crops
30 April 2007
Energy crop company Ceres, Inc. and Rohm and Haas Company are collaborating on a three-year project to determine if energy crops planted for cellulosic ethanol could simultaneously produce methacrylate monomers, a key raw material used in the manufacture of many products including paint and coatings, building materials, and acrylic sheet and resins.
More than 1.5 billion pounds of methacrylate monomers are produced annually in the United States, a market worth $780 million. Successful development of a bio-based process could one day displace as many as 280 million gallons of oil annually with a renewable source.
Molecular biologists and biochemistry experts at Ceres say that some plants naturally produce compounds similar to methacrylate monomers, but do not necessarily accumulate them in extractable forms or quantities. They believe it may be feasible to alter the way plants produce these compounds so that they can be extracted from the dried stalks, stems and leaves before these are fed into biorefineries producing ethanol from cellulose.
Ceres President and CEO Richard Hamilton says the potential production of co-products may encourage greater investments in biorefineries capable of producing ethanol from cellulose.
Getting the cellulosic ethanol industry up and running will take significant investments and the bigger the prize at the end, the better. Methacrylate monomers are a compelling co-product due to the significant market size, feasibility of plant-based production and the fact that it is currently derived from oil and natural gas.
—Richard Hamilton
Steve Bobzin, Ph.D., Ceres’ principal investigator on the grant, says that the research will focus first on producing methacrylate monomers and similar compounds in a model plant with well-understood metabolic pathways. Successful traits would then be applied to energy crops. Funding for this project was provided by USDA and DOE’s 2006 Biomass R&D Initiative grant program, which has targeted $17.5 million for 17 biomass projects. (Earlier post.)
Separately, Ceres received a second $1.5 million grant under the program to double switchgrass yields by 2020. Switchgrass is one of the top feedstocks being considered for cellulosic ethanol production.
Ceres is a developer of high-yielding energy crops that can be planted as feedstocks for cellulosic ethanol production. Its development efforts cover switchgrass, miscanthus, poplar and others. Founded in 1997 as a plant genomics company, Ceres holds the largest proprietary collection of fully sequenced plant genes, including more than 75,000 genes and 10,000 gene promoters.
Also separately, Segetis, a privately held green chemistry company, last week secured $15 million in Series A funding from Khosla Ventures. Segetis is developing a new versatile functional monomer platform from low-cost renewable sources.
Algae which can be grown by and consume the Co2 directly from coal fired power plants can also supply oil for biodiesel on the first press, butanol (not ethanol) from the leftover cellulose and Methacrylate Monomers from the residue to make products such as plastics and pharmaceuticals. This versatility seems to make Algae the best single bio-source fuel. Yes, I know we will need varied and distributed fuel sources, however with algae we can let the dead sleep without taking valuable land from growing food and without more deforestation.
Posted by: Tim | 30 April 2007 at 11:15 AM
Hi,
I really do not agree with all this bio-resin stuff. The fuel demand for bio resources is going to be high and necasary for CO2 abatement. Diverting these resources from fuel when we could be sequestering petroleum in resins for money seems backwards to me.
Posted by: donee | 30 April 2007 at 05:06 PM
donee,
Most biomass energy systems are now energy positive, which means they make more energy then is put in, so there is no increasing fuel use to make biomass. In theory it would be far more efficent to make a plant that makes plastic monomers, extract the monomers, polymerize the monomers into plastic and ferment the left overs into fuel then to mine oil, crack the oil, go through a multiple step organic chemistry synthesis that highly inefficient to produce a plastic monomer, then polymerize the monomers into plastic.
Posted by: ben | 01 May 2007 at 05:59 PM