Chemical Engineering November 2013 - 15

Newsfront
42ND KIRKPATRICK
AWARD ANNOUNCED
Six companies are honored
for innovation in chemical engineering
L
ast month at the ChemInnovations
Conference and Exhibition
(Galveston, Tex.; September
25-26), Chemical Engineering
(CE) had the pleasure of honoring this
year's finalists and the winner of the
2013 Kirkpatrick Chemical Engineering
Achievement Award, a biennial
prize that the magazine has bestowed
continuously since the early 1930s (for
more, see CE, January 2013, p. 17).
The award recognizes the most noteworthy
chemical engineering technology
commercialized anywhere in the
world during 2011 or 2012.
CE presented the top prize of the
42nd Kirkpatrick Chemical Engineering
Achievement Award to Genomatica,
Inc. (San Diego, Calif.; www.genomatica.com)
for its bio-based 1,4-butanediol
(BDO). Honor awards were also
presented to: Rive Technology (Princeton,
N.J.; www.rivetechnology.com) for
its Molecular Highway catalyst technology;
Braskem S.A. (Sao Paulo, Brazil;
www.braskem.com.br) for its sugarcane-based
ethylene and polyethylene;
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
(PNNL, Richland, Wash.; www.pnl.gov)
and Archer Daniels Midland Co. (ADM;
Decatur, Ill.; www.adm.com) for their
propylene glycol from renewable resources;
and to Eastman Chemical Co.
(Kingsport, Tenn.; www.eastman.com)
for its Perennial Wood.
GENOMATICA'S WINNING
ACHIEVEMENT
Bio-based 1,4-butanediol
BDO and its derivatives are widely
used for producing plastics, solvents,
electronic chemicals and elastic fibers.
Conventional production routes to
BDO rely on fossil-fuel derived feedstocks,
such as natural gas, butane,
butadiene and propylene.
In 2012, Genomatica, working
with its partner DuPont
Tate & Lyle BioProducts LLC
(Loudon, Tenn.; www.duponttateandlyle.com),
delivered a
breakthrough in chemical engineering:
the successful commercial-scale,
biologically based
production of 5 million pounds
of BDO in just five weeks. This
is the first time BDO has been
produced at commercial scale
from renewable feedstocks,
and presents a new paradigm
for the multi-trillion-dollar chemical
industry - producing the exact same
commodity chemical via large-scale
fermentation and recovery (Figure 1).
Additionally, Genomatica produced
2013 BOARD OF JUDGES
Jean-Claude Charpentier, ENSIC, Université de Lorraine
Ramesh C. Chawla, Howard University
Khaled A. M. Gasem, Oklahoma State University
Rakesh Gupta, West Virginia University
Andrew Livingston, Imperial College
Wolfgang Marquardt, RWTH Aachen University
Ross McCollum, California Institute of Technology
Martha C. Mitchell, New Mexico State University
Arvind Varma, Purdue University
more BDO in just five weeks than its
peers did for their bio-based products
in all of 2012, equivalent to a ten-fold
scale-up. Genomatica's BDO process
also has a lower environmental footprint
and is designed for better overall
economics than conventional BDO
made from fossil fuels.
To achieve this breakthrough,
Genomatica tackled multiple challenging
chemical engineering problems,
including the following:
Developing a new 'platform' of
chemical engineering tools. These
included proprietary metabolic modeling
software, strain engineering tools
and more. They can be thought of as
Dextrose feedstock
and raw materials
Sterilization
Separation
akin to traditional chemical-process
modeling tools such as Aspen, but tailored
for industrial biotechnology. The
novelty and high potential of this platform
technology has been recognized
with the U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency's (EPA; Washington, D.C.)
Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge
Award.
Engineering novel biological pathways.
Genomatica did this by applying
metabolic engineering - which
uses chemical engineering principles,
like material balances, thermodynamics
and kinetics to biology - to understand
and control cellular metabolism.
As BDO is not naturally produced in
known organisms, Genomatica had to
invent a way for cells to make it. Details
of how it overcame this challenge
were published in Nature Chemical
Biology, July 2011, pp. 445-452.
Genomatica's BDO process
Fermentation
Water removal
Cell mass removal
Purification
Purified BIO-BDO
FIGURE 1. Genomatica's process uses engineered E. coli to directly make BDO
from sugars
CHEMICAL ENGINEERING WWW.CHE.COM NOVEMBER 2013 15
http://www.dupont http://www.tateandlyle.com http://www.genomat http://www.ica.com http://www.rivetechnology.com http://www.braskem.com.br http://www.pnl.gov http://www.adm.com http://www.eastman.com http://WWW.CHE.COM
Chemical Engineering November 2013

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