US-based INVISTA is one of the world’s largest integrated producers of chemical intermediates, polymers and fibers. The Centre for Process Innovation is a UK-based technology innovation center and part of the High Value Manufacturing Catapult. It uses applied knowledge in science and engineering combined with advanced development facilities to enable its clients to develop, prove, prototype and scale up the next generation of products and processes.

The collaboration will leverage INVISTA’s capabilities in biotechnology and catalysis, and knowledge of the chemicals industry, along with CPI’s applied knowledge in science and engineering and capabilities in new process/product development and scale-up for the development of new gas-fermentation-based routes to industrial chemicals.

INVISTA believes biotechnology has the potential to significantly improve the cost and availability of several chemicals and raw materials that are used to produce its current products. We see gas fermentation as a key enabling technology that will allow the use of potentially advantaged gas feedstocks such as waste industrial gases. CPI’s excellent capabilities and facilities are additive to our own, and we are pleased to announce this exciting collaboration.

—Warren Primeaux, president of INVISTA Intermediates

Following the recent and significant advances in the field of Synthetic Biology, CPI believes that gas fermentation technology holds great promise to unlock the economic production of commodity products.

—Nigel Perry, CEO of CPI