Lygos plans commercial plant for biobased chemicals

Lygos is taking a stab at large-scale biobased chemical production. The 13-year-old specialty chemical firm is partnering with CJ Bio to build a facility in Fort Dodge, Iowa, that will produce 40,000 metric tons (t) per year of polyaspartates and malonates from aspartic acid and malonic acid.

Lygos has developed yeast strains that can convert sugar into the two organic acids, which are normally derived from fossil fuels.

CJ will use that technology to produce the acids at a plant in Fort Dodge, where it already makes fermentation-derived amino acids. Lygos will build adjacent facilities that chemically transform the acids into products with applications in personal care, coatings, and agriculture. The company says the site could eventually produce up to 100,000 t per year of biobased chemicals.

The initial phase of Lygos’s project would result in one of the largest biobased chemical plants in the US. Qore is building a facility that will produce 65,000 t per year of biobased 1,4-butanediol using technology from Genomatica. Solugen is building a plant to make 75,000 t per year of biobased glucaric acid, gluconic acid, and hydrogen peroxide.

CEO Eric Steen says Lygos works with customers to design specialized formulations of its biobased materials. For example, polyaspartates can be used to make products as diverse as fertilizer additives to increase nutrient uptake and corrosion inhibitors for water treatment. “This isn’t just making a bulk ingredient,” he says.

Steve Slome, a chemical industry analyst with the research firm NexantECA, says the approach differentiates Lygos from previous biobased chemical firms that failed to commercialize molecules such as succinic acid.

Like aspartic acid and malonic acid, succinic acid can be transformed into multiple derivatives. Firms such as BioAmber and Myriant argued that the chemical could be a platform for a biobased chemical industry. But they struggled to match the price of fossil-derived alternatives, and customers willing to convert succinic acid into useful products never materialized.

By going a step further and producing those derivatives itself, Lygos could become a different story, Slome says. “They’re not waiting for somebody else to do something interesting with this,” he says.