Ethanol: The Renewable Naphtha

by Luca Zullo (Ethanol Producer Magazine/Greenyug) With existing capabilities, chemical coproducts represent a low-hanging fruit for the industry. Ethanol, in fact, is a better feedstock for some chemicals than oil-based sources.

The chemical industry predates the oil industry, but it is the development of industrial organic chemistry, made possible by abundant hydrocarbons, that made the modern chemical industry we know today.

Surprisingly, given all the diversity in appearance, properties and applications, virtually all of the organic chemical industry output comes from a handful of base chemicals—methane, ethylene, propylene, butylene, and the aromatics benzene, toluene and xylene. With the exception of methane, all these chemicals are derived from a crude oil fraction: naphtha.

The chemical industry consumes less than 10 percent, on average, of a standard 42-gallon barrel of oil, yet it provides more than 40 percent of the overall commercial value of all barrel derivatives.

The ethanol industry should look at the naphtha model with interest as it searches for new growth opportunities. Ethanol is the perfect renewable naphtha.

Chemical Feedstock
Ethanol, like naphtha, is mainly a fuel molecule with characteristics that make it an excellent chemical feedstock. It is reactive and produced in large volumes with well-understood and advantageous economics. Ethanol, unlike naphtha, is a pure substance. For chemical synthesis, pure substances have an advantage over mixtures like naphtha, as the desired chemistry might require fewer synthesis and separation steps.

Ethanol chemistry is rich in possible reaction pathways and allows for the synthesis of a variety of products such as acetates, esters, ketones, fatty alcohols and many more with broad applications in several industries. Many of these products have no economically or technically viable fermentation synthesis route. Often, these chemicals also are drop-in replacements for molecules of broad market appeal that are currently derived from fossil resources. Drop-in replacements make it easier to manage the market risk and minimize adoption cost for the buyers.

These chemicals, which can be both a feedstock for other synthesis or used in end-user products, commonly command several hundred dollars per ton premiums over ethanol.

A catalytic process that uses ethanol as feedstock can literally be bolted onto the mill without the needs of any retrofit on the front end.

This vision has prompted Greenyug to develop an ethanol-to-ethyl acetate plant adjacent to the ADM corn processing plant in Columbus, Nebraska. READ MORE