Week 4 – Session 26

Bio-sourced Chemicals

Perrine BABIN

MOOC ENERGY TRANSITION

IFP SCHOOL
Introduction
Bio-sourced chemicals, by definition, are chemicals produced using biomass as raw
material. Be careful, do not confuse bio-sourced with biodegradable, which are
materials that can be degraded by microorganisms.

A bio-sourced product can also be biodegradable, but it does not mean it is always
the case.

The terminology “Bio” can also be used for chemicals which are obtained using a
biotechnology or a bioprocess.

But in this session, we will focus only on bio-sourced chemicals which can be used to
produce biosourced plastics.

Biomass generation
Biomass raw materials are divided in three categories leading to 3 generations:

• 1st generation biomass comes from agro-based feedstock, where plants

which are rich in carbohydrate, such as corn or sugar cane are used to
produce ethanol.
• The second generation biomass concerns wood industry waste, forest
exploitation residues, agricultural waste as well as dedicated crops and
herbaceous plants. We also talk about ligno-cellulosic feedstock.
• The third generation comes from algae and it have a higher yield compared
to first and second generation sources, but its process is still being developed,
so its route is not economically viable yet.

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Why it is – from a, environmental point of view –
interesting to produce this chemicals from biomass?
Biomass uses some CO2 in order to live and to grow.

Then, just like the picture shows, the production of chemicals and then plastics for
tyres, bottles or shoes for example provides some CO2 emissions.

in case of using biomass as a feedstock, this CO2 emission can be compensated by

the CO2 captured by the vegetables or plants.

This drastically reduces the CO2 emissions; then along the life cycle of such chemicals
or plastics in some cases there is more CO2 consumed than produced, meaning a
negative mass balance.

How we can produce such bio-sourced chemicals?

As a reminder, the standard chemicals or petrochemicals are obtained by distillation
of crude oil and then, for example:

• By steam cracking of Light Naphta for Olefins;

• By catalytic reforminf of Heavy Naphta for Aromatics;
• And by Catalytic Cracking for propylene.

There are three paths to produce bio-based chemicals from biomass. The bio-based
chemicals intermediates are classified as drop-ins, smart drop-ins and dedicated
chemicals.

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Drop-ins: these chemicals are the bio-sourced versions of petrochemicals, so they
come in the production route in an early step. Usually they are related to commodity
polymers as polyethylene (PE), Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and polypropylene
(PP).

Smart drop-ins: these chemicals are also chemically the same as the oil-sourced
ones, but they stand out because either they require less energy to be produced, or
they are produced in a shorter time, or they do not have any toxic by-products
compared to its fossil-based analogous. Besides these advantages, smart drop-ins
enter the production route in a late step.

Dedicated: these chemicals do not have a similar fossil-based counterpart because

they have a completely different production route. As examples, we have polylactic
acid (PLA), polyethylene furanoate (PEF).

Example: production route of a bio-sourced polyethylene

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The first processing step, after harvesting, is to ferment the biomass – in this case
sugar cane – which leads to carboxylic acids, alcohols and unconverted
carbohydrates (biomass). Therefore, it is necessary to separate the product of
interest, wet ethanol.

The separation process is followed by a reaction step, for instance, to convert

ethanol into monomers – in this case ethylene – which are the building blocks used to
produce bio-sourced plastics.

In the reaction unit, the monomers are produced accompanied of impurities, thus
there is a purification step before storage.

Afterwards, polymerization reaction to produce the polyethylene in this case and

further processing such as blow molding lead to a final bio-sourced polyethylene
bottle.

Some figures
Nowadays, we produce a little bit more than 2 million of tons of bioplastics which
represents nearby 0,5% of global plastics production.

Assuming that the bioplastics production will grow by 10% per year, in 2035 the
production will reach 10 million of tons which will represent around 12% of WW
plastics production.

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Conclusion
Bio-sourced chemicals are produced from biomass and are used to synthetize bio-
sourced plastics.

Bio-sourced chemicals are an alternative way to produce chemicals and plastics by

being less CO2 intensive.

One of the most used plastic, Polyethylene, is industrially produced from sugar cane,
at the scale of 200 000 tons per year.

In 2035 bio-sourced plastics production should reach 10 million of tons which will
represent around 12% of WW plastics production.

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