CO Business

The Novomer process can also produce polypropiolactone, a biodegradable polymer that has the potential to replace many of today’s common packaging materials. Novomer’s process has been demonstrated to have a 20-50% lower cost and is more environmentally friendly than today’s technologies used to make the same chemicals.

The Novomer process is feedstock agnostic, i.e. the beta-propiolactone can be produced from either petroleum or bio-based feed stocks. The Novomer route to bio-based chemicals avoids many of the challenges of a fermentation-based approach by:

• Leveraging the use of ethanol and syngas (bio-derived) as feedstock technologies
• Using traditional chemical industry infrastructure for the production process, eliminating the need for further fermentation steps

The low production cost can be attributed to the high selectivity of the catalyst, the lower capital cost for commercial plants, low to moderate operating conditions, use of CO as a raw material, and abundant supply of ethane in many parts of the world to make cheap EO. The carbon and energy footprints using Novomer’s catalyst will also be lower when the CO is sourced from a waste stream of another process, biomass via gasification, or another renewable starting material.

At the heart of the Novomer CO platform is a novel carbonylation catalyst that was discovered at Cornell University, and is exclusively licensed to Novomer. Novomer has designed an innovative catalyst system and developed a process that is able to leverage the attributes of the novel catalyst. The carbonylation catalyst has selectivity in excess of 99% and operates at moderate conditions.

The team at Novomer have identified and tested the key unit operations required for the conversion of CO and EO in a batch environment. The process was then scaled up and validated in a continuous process. During 2014 Novomer designed and deployed a fully automated continuous pilot process as the next step towards the design of world-scale plant.

The Novomer process is unique in that the platform can produce 3-carbon, 4 carbon and polymeric products using the same catalyst system. The “front-end” of the process, namely the production of the beta propiolactone is common across all products. The CO platform technology will integrate easily in existing operating sites as the catalyst system is robust and is active in the presence of molecules such as CO2 and H2.

Novomer’s carbon monoxide technology will be significantly lower cost than the competing processes used today to make acrylic acid, butanediol, and succinic acid. The cost advantage can be attributed to the following:

1. The price of ethylene oxide – one of Novomer’s raw materials – is expected to remain very low because of abundant ethane supplies in many parts of the world. For example, large amounts of ethane exist in Canada, the Middle East, and in US shale gas (more details below). Additionally, low cost ethane from shale is possible in Europe, Asia, and other parts of the world when extraction technologies mature.
2. Novomer`s catalyst is 99.9% selective and does not form any byproducts
3. Target molecules are composed of 40-60% carbon monoxide which is a relatively low cost feedstock

Shale gas does not benefit all petrochemical producers, but will provide Novomer with a sustainable competitive advantage. Most chemical feedstock costs are linked to the price of crude oil, which can vary widely with political instability, market speculation and world demand. The potential to use shale gas enables Novomer`s cost structure to be decoupled from the price of crude oil and allow for production of lower cost chemicals compared to those sold today.