Ethanol’s Opportunity in the Chemical Market

by Luke Geiver (Ethanol Producer Magazine) A Nebraska-focused tech startup and a Latin American chemical supplier highlight two options for using ethanol as the building block for intermediate chemicals. -- The future of ethanol for intermediate chemical production can be seen next door to a wet mill in Columbus, Nebraska, and thousands of miles south in Sao Paolo, Brazil.

Greenyug LLC, a startup technology development company headquartered in Santa Barbara, California, intends to break ground in Nebraska this summer alongside an Archer Daniels Midland Co. facility. The bolt-on facility—already tested in India—is designed to convert nondenatured ethanol into ethyl acetate, a product used in coatings, paint and cleaning products. Formed in 2008, the company—whose name borrows from English and Sanskrit to spell green era—believes it is entering a massive and economically lucrative market by utilizing ethanol as the main building block for many widely used chemicals.

Braskem, the largest petrochemical company in Latin America, has been converting sugarcane-based ethanol into polyethylene at its facilities in Brazil for several years.

While not the only companies developing green chemicals, Greenyug the startup, and Braskem the global player, show the range of approaches and viable pathways for ethanol to fuel processes other than engine combustion.

“Our profitability is based on the spread between ethanol and the products, not unlike the petrochemical industry that focuses on the spread between naphtha and chemicals,” Zullo (Luca Zullo, vice president of commercialization) says.

“Approximately 5 percent of the oil barrel goes into chemicals generating 40 percent of its value. We can do the same for the ethanol industry using a foundation of proven petrochemical technologies,” Zullo says.

“Nowhere in our assumption do we predicate a premium because of a green product,” he says. “Make no mistake, our products are green and often the only 100 percent renewable-based product available. However, from the beginning, we have intended to compete purely on a market basis.”

To finance the plant, Greenyug utilized St. Louis-based Stern Brothers. The company will issue bonds for its project with USDA backing under its business and industry loan guarantee program.

Ethanol streamed from the ADM facility does not have to be tweaked before it enters Greenyug’s Prairie Catalytic LLC facility—the subsidiary the company formed to operate the Nebraska plant. “From an ethanol plant’s perspective, this is a very simple proposition. When the plant is ready to go, one just diverts some ethanol from the load-out to our plant,” Zullo says. There is no need to retrofit anything on the plant and there is nothing to change with the DDGs. In some cases, the bolt-on process could allow the plant to increase grind rate, Zullo says.

The amount of ethanol needed for the Greenyug process is not enough to change or disrupt ethanol plant fuel market focus, he says, but it is enough to add considerable value to the fraction of ethanol that is used for the chemical production process.

Because of the country’s support and massive volumes of sugarcane-based ethanol, Braskem is shipping a 100 percent green plastic product across the world—and even into space. Its green polyethylene is used in packaging, plastic bags and a 3-D printer designed and used with Braskem’s ethanol-based green polyethylene on the International Space Station.

The current Green PE is sold at a premium to its fossil-equivalents offered by Braskem, a variable of the product that, unlike Zullo, doesn’t bother Jankowski or the Braskem team. READ MORE