The U.S. Energy Department’s Office of Energy (DOE) Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Bioenergy Technologies announced a grant of up to $2.5 million to NatureWorks, LLC (Minnetonka, MN; www.natureworksllc.com), one of the world’s leading suppliers of bioplastics, in support of an ongoing program that aims to sequester and use methane, a potent greenhouse gas, as a feedstock for the company’s Ingeo biopolymers and intermediates.
The grant supports an ongoing multi-year joint development program between NatureWorks and Calysta, Inc. (Menlo Park, Calif.; www.calysta.com), with the specific goal of transforming, via a fermentation process, renewable biomethane into lactic acid, the building block for Ingeo. Ingeo naturally advanced bioplastics and intermediates are used worldwide in a host of consumer and industrial products.
The research and development (R&D) collaboration with Calysta addresses NatureWorks’ strategic interests in feedstock diversification and a structurally simplified, lower-cost Ingeo production platform and leverages Calysta’s Biological Gas-to-Chemicals platform for biological conversion of methane to high value chemicals. For NatureWorks, methane could be an additional feedstock several generations removed from the simple plant sugars used today in a lactic acid fermentation process at the NatureWorks Blair, Nebraska, Ingeo production facility.
This June, a year after the joint development program was announced, Calysta demonstrated lab-scale production of lactic acid from methane, a major milestone in the project. Fundamental R&D should be completed in the next two to three years, enabling pilot production in three to five years. If successful, the technology could directly produce lactic acid from any of these methane sources.
“If proven through this collaboration, methane to lactic acid conversion technology could be revolutionary, providing sustainable alternative feedstocks for Ingeo,” said NatureWorks Ken Williams, program leader for the Calysta-NatureWorks collaboration. “When coupled with NatureWorks’ proven commercial process for lactic acid to Ingeo, the methane to lactic acid process would transform a harmful greenhouse gas into useful and in-demand consumer and industrial products. This disruptive platform could support high-value chemicals and liquid fuels. Our team thanks the Bioenergy Technologies Office and is proud to have been recognized by the Department of Energy grant for this NatureWorks and Calysta research collaboration.”