US military seeks more domestic chemical capacity

The US Department of Defense (DOD) is looking to fund private industry projects that will expand US production of 28 chemicals, including propellants, dyes, and ingredients for fuel and explosive formulations. The funding is intended to scale up synthetic methods for the chemicals from the bench to pilot- and demonstration-scale plants.

Each project will be eligible for $1 million to $24 million, parceled out over 5 years. In an earlier round of the same basic program, the DOD provided seven US companies with a total of $192.5 million in capital expenditure support. In a separate initiative, the DOD handed out more than $23 million this summer in grants for start-up companies to design fermentation plants for defense chemicals, food, and fuel.

The overall goal is to build critical chemical supply chains that don’t depend on adversarial nations, says Marta Pazos, a federal contractor who works with the DOD and other parts of the US government on the programs. The new list prioritizes high-impact chemicals that, today, usually come from China, Russia, and, to a lesser extent, Iran and North Korea.

For example, the defense contractor Lockheed Martin is developing new long-range missiles that would get their bang from a polycyclic nitroamine called CL-20. But Pazos says most large-scale supply of three of that chemical’s precursors—glyoxal, benzylamine, and tetraacetyldiamino hexaazaisowurtzitane—is in China.

A secondary emphasis for the selections, Pazos says, is chemicals with uses outside of warfare. When the DOD-backed manufacturing assets aren’t being used to supply the government, companies will be free to sell products to other customers. For example, benzylamine is also used in pharmaceutical synthesis, she says, and glyoxal is used in coatings and adhesives.

The initiative goes beyond selecting chemicals and doling out cash. Pazos says the DOD recently helped set up the Defense Industrial Base Consortium, a nongovernmental organization that will shoulder a lot of the administrative load associated with the federal procurement process. “That is all meant to lower barriers of entry, so any company who wants to take advantage of government funding will be able to do so,” she says.