The ADM Way Of Making Chemicals

Archer Daniels Midland Co. was founded in 1902 to process linseed oil, and for the next 60 years it was a chemical company, supplying the oil and its derivatives to alkyd paint makers, foundry products companies, and other industrial firms.

ADM sold its chemical business to Ashland Oil in 1967 to focus on agriculture, but ADM, one of the world's largest agricultural processors, has been creeping back into the chemical arena ever since. In the 1970s, it commercialized fermentation-derived fuel ethanol. In the 1990s, it bought Pfizer's citric acid business and opened a fermentation complex that makes feed additives including lysine and threonine.

Now ADM is marching into the heart of the chemical business with a new wave of industrial products that puts it head-to-head with some of the chemical industry's biggest players. Unlike almost all of these competitors, however, ADM is making its products not from petroleum-derived feedstocks but from corn, soybeans, and other crops.

Its initial industrial forays seem successful so far. Along with other fermenters, ADM has managed to largely push petrochemical ethanol out of the industrial ethanol market. It is using fermentation to make the aquaculture pigment astaxanthin, providing a natural alternative to synthetic material from firms such as BASF and DSM.

ADM recently launched Archer RC, a corn-oil-derived paint coalescent that competes with synthetic products from Eastman Chemical and other firms. And it is in the process of building two U.S. plants to produce biodiesel, a vegetable-oil-derived fuel that competes with petroleum-based diesel. It already operates two such plants in Germany and is building a third one there.

In November, ADM announced perhaps its most audacious bioproducts move yet: plans to build a large-scale facility that will make propylene glycol and ethylene glycol out of corn and soybeans rather than the propylene and ethylene used by Dow Chemical, Lyondell Chemical, and other current producers. The plant's location and size have yet to be disclosed.

Using renewable resources makes for good public relations. Indeed, ADM was lauded as the winner of two Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Awards last year (C&EN, June 27, 2005, page 40). One award, shared with enzymes maker Novozymes, was for an enzymatic method of producing margarine that creates little or no trans-fatty acids. The other was for Archer RC.

But for Mike Rath, general manager of ADM's oleochemicals/specialty oils and fats division, the push into chemicals first and foremost makes business sense. He reasons that ADM successfully developed ethanol and biodiesel as alternatives to petroleum in transportation-where about two-thirds of crude oil is used-and now is merely targeting another major petroleum market.

Rath points to four competencies that ADM brings to the industrial chemical table: access to a variety of renewable feedstocks, both carbohydrate and oilseed; good separation technology developed from years of grain and oilseed refining; fermentation ability honed as the largest U.S. ethanol producer; and a world-renowned distribution network.

Furthermore, in pushing into the chemical market, Rath is backed by an R&D organization that, while not especially high profile, is developing a track record in renewable bioproducts that is rivaling that of better known research groups at DuPont, Cargill, BASF, and other big chemical companies.

Mark Matlock, a polymer chemist and ADM's senior vice president of research, explains that ADM's earlier initiatives involved fermentation-derived chemicals such as citric acid and lactic acid, which are largely used by the food industry. Most of the new products, in contrast, are industrial chemicals and are produced by transforming agricultural feedstocks through catalytic means.

Biodiesel, for example, is produced by reacting canola oil, soybean oil, or any other oil or fat with methanol. Glycerin is obtained as a by-product. Archer RC, the coalescent, is made by reacting propylene glycol with fatty acids derived from corn oil in a process that also yields glycerin as a by-product.

ADM's propylene glycol process was actually developed in the early 1990s and tested on the pilot scale at ADM headquarters in Decatur, Ill. "We ran it for a while," Matlock says, "and then we hit $12 oil." Today, though, oil is almost $60 a barrel, and Matlock and colleague Paul D. Bloom, research manager for new industrial chemicals, think ADM's propylene glycol will be competitive with the petroleum-derived equivalent.

To maintain feedstock flexibility, company researchers have come up with dual processes that run on carbohydrates and vegetable oils. In the first, corn-derived glucose is converted to sorbitol via hydrogenation and then to a mixture of polyols-propylene glycol, ethylene glycol, and glycerin-via hydrogenolysis.

In the second process, glycerin captured as a by-product of making products such as biodiesel and Archer RC is converted to propylene glycol alone via hydrogenolysis. Propylene glycol can then be channeled back into Archer RC production so that the coalescent is derived entirely from renewable resources.

While such chemistry is not new-some of it even dates back to World War II-Matlock and Bloom say they are conducting it with new, more efficient catalysts. Most, they readily admit, are not homegrown. "We are a company where the 'not invented here' syndrome does not exist," Matlock says.

The Archer RC chemistry, for example, was invented by Michael R. Van De Mark, a chemist at the University of Missouri, Rolla. New hydrogenolysis catalysts that convert glycerin to propylene glycol have been under development for the past year under a Cooperative Research & Development Agreement (CRADA) with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the process technology firm UOP.

In July, ADM formed a CRADA with Argonne National Laboratory under which both company and government scientists will work to optimize production of gluconic acid from sugars using Argonne's separative bioreactor technology. And Matlock says ADM is on the verge of announcing an R&D agreement with Battelle under which the science nonprofit will help ADM develop applications for a series of new molecules derived from renewable resources.

While these developmental efforts are still small in scale, ADM is not a company to keep things that way. After all, Matlock points out, every day around the world ADM processes 100,000 tons of oilseeds and 50,000 tons of both corn and wheat.

A sense of the scale at which ADM wants to manufacture bioproducts can be found in an alliance formed late in 2004 with Metabolix, a Cambridge, Mass., firm that has developed a process for fermenting agricultural feedstocks into polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA) plastics. ADM said it would work with the company to build a 50,000-ton-per-year plant-large by specialty plastics standards. According to Matlock, pilot tests conducted last summer were encouraging, and a decision on building the commercial plant will be made early this year.

Matlock and Bloom note that PHA is a biodegradable material that can easily be modified with butanediol or other comonomers to produce plastics with functionality similar to urethanes, elastomers, adhesives, and other polymers that are made through multistep chemical syntheses.

Whereas traditional chemical companies must start with basic hydrocarbons and build their products from the ground up, Bloom says PHA and other agriculture-based products enjoy a head start from more complex natural raw materials. "We take a minimalist approach to getting the same functionality in a limited number of steps," he says. "We want to harness the power of what nature has provided."