Ever since I was introduced to this topic I have been thinking about it in terms of how it could revolutionize the composites industry. What this will take – at least from my perspective – is convincing a few companies that are in the business of producing the fibers and resins for the industry to seriously consider using precision fermentation to make the chemistries like bisphenol-F or A for epoxies, acrylonitrile for carbon fibers, and a host of other organic chemistries all of which as I have previously written about can be derived from plants. So, I need to tell the story about where my thoughts ended up and how I got to this conclusion.
Veg News - Vegan Cheese for Pizza - Yes it's a thing and it tastes like the real deal
You know I had to do this. Who doesn’t love a nice cheesy slice of pizza where the mozzarella is dripping off the sides and still attached no matter whether it has been cut or not. While this may or may not be actual vegan cheese from precision fermentation, it is part of the point I want to make in this post. Precision fermentation has been used to make mozzarella cheese, and there is at least one company that is marketing precision fermentation derived mozzarella.
The name of the company is New Culture and they have teamed up with none other than the agricultural giant ADM to produce the protein from milk that makes mozzarella as stringy as it is. This protein is casein and it is what gives cheese not only its texture but also its flavor. ADM has decided that it wants to get involved in this precision fermented foods in a big way, and they are teaming up with startups like New Culture that want to make a food product that they can sell on the open market and that people will buy. So, who doesn’t like mozzarella on their pizza, whether it came from a cow or a fermentation vat – who cares?
What I want to highlight in this post, however, is the molecular structure of casein and how familiar this structure is to anyone that works in the resin side of the composite material precursor business. Here’s what the molecular diagram of casein looks like.
Now let's take a look at the molecular structure of bisphenol-A for comparison
See any similarities here? See the two six-sided rings? It is the nitrogen in the ring on the right and the two nitrogen atoms in the middle between these two rings that makes casein a protein. Basically all that has to be done here is to replace the nitrogen in the ring on the right with a carbon atom, make the stuff between the two rings carbon and hydrogen, take one of the OH groups and put it on the ring to the right, turn the other one into an OH, and you have bisphenol-A.
While this total reaction would be very difficult to accomplish in most laboratories and the end product would be more expensive than the bisphenol-A that is derived from petroleum, using bacteria eating the same plant waste based sugars or even CO2 from the atmosphere and creating bisphenol-A versus casein seems to me like it would be a much less expensive route to making the epoxy precursor bisphenol-A. The other interesting thing about this is that the bisphenol-A would be pure and very little post processing of the brew that comes out of the precision fermentation bath would be necessary. This is quite unlike what it would take to make bisphenol-A from plant waste because there is very little refining or processing, just feed the yeast and out comes pure bisphenol-A.
I need to share another food picture just so that everyone understands that precision fermentation, with the right microbiologists working in a lab to modify the genetics of a bacterium or yeast, or even a mold to produce a single, pure organic compound. The bacteria used originally was E. Coli since it is the most studied bacterium we have and its DNA sequence is well mapped. Since that time and since precision fermentation has seen something of a renaissance there are also some bacillus-type bacteria, yeasts, and actually some fungi (molds?) like aspergillus. These other bacteria lend themselves to particular useful classes of organics so they each have their own niche.
I talked a couple of weeks ago about palm oil that is manufactured by C16 Biosciences using a modified yeast that can produce the oil in great quantities using the CO2 from biomass waste. This company has made a real business out of this and is about to expand exponentially. They used a yeast primarily because yeasts are quite capable of making oils as well as alcohols.
What C16 produces in their fermentation vats is palmitic acid, an organic acid that is the main backbone of palm oil. They also produce some of the other fatty acids that are present in palm oil. A molecular diagram of palmitic acid, along with some other fatty acids that are in palm oil is shown below just so that everyone gets an idea of what can and is being produced using precision fermentation.
What everyone should take note of is the Linoleic and Oleic acids here. These fatty acids with double bonds in them are very common in plant oils. Linoleic acid is an essential nutrient for humans to keep our skin healthy as well as our immune system.
So what does all of this have to do with composites and especially composites sustainability? That is the central question that I answered to myself this week. The answer that came to me is that in addition to developing all of the extraction technologies and industrial scale organic chemistry necessary to take plant and forest products waste and convert the sugars and oils into precursors for fibers and resins, at the same time we could also start developing the genetically modified bacteria that would be required to make these same compounds using precision fermentation.
So, here is how I see this whole endeavor playing out for the companies that are in the business of producing the fibers and resins in the composites industry. The overall goal here of course is to wean ourselves off of Big Oil and start developing a more biologically based approach to development of these compounds. This is something that I have been writing about in several of the newsletters that I have posted, and is the primary subject of my upcoming book.
The reason that I think that the fiber and resin manufacturers should focus on plant-derived sugars, polysaccharides, and oils is that the chemical extraction and industrial scale processing equipment is already in existence in these companies. All that is required to add some plant sugars and oils is to do the extraction to get the oils and simplify the sugars and feed them into their current feedstock. They can already convert these simple organics into the precursors for fibers and resins.
Largely this is done now at oil refineries and petrochemical facilities like what is owned by companies like DuPont and others here in the US and BASF, Shell, and others in Europe. There are companies in Asia as well that already have the capacity to take incoming petroleum or refined products and convert them to precursors for fibers and resins.
In addition, the large petrochemical companies, largely owned by Big Oil, are all aware of the need to upend their business models and find a new source of this chemistry that is not petroleum. In other words, the political and social winds are blowing that direction and the petrochemical companies have taken notice.
That is why I still believe that near term we need to focus on plant-based organic chemistry for our future structural materials. In the meantime (or Meanwhile if you watch Stephen Colbert) precision fermentation, although it is in its infancy, has the potential to, once it is scaled up to industrial production levels, generate these fiber and resin precursors in pure form for much less cost than petroleum certainly, but also with plant. With plants you have to grow them, harvest them, process them to create what you want, and then separate the compounds you really want from all of the rest of the organic material that comes along with using a plant.
With precision fermentation all you have to do is to genetically modify a yeast to enable the yeast to use nearly any organic sugar or even CO2 from the atmosphere and make a pure form of the compound that you need to manufacture your fiber or resin. Once you have the yeast, the rest of the process is just having the fermentation tank farm in an indoor environmentally controlled warehouse and let your yeast do the rest.
We do need to highlight the fact that what precision fermentation will produce is a pure compound of whatever we are interested in producing. The first one that was made of course was insulin, and that was on the order of 40 years ago or so. The next thing that someone in a lab came up with was rennet for cheese making, which has completely taken over the cheese making industry. I talked about these two compounds in my precision fermentation post a couple of weeks back. Now that companies like ADM are going into this in a big way, and making large investments in startups like New Culture, it is only a matter of time before some enterprising companies in the fiber and resin business take note.
Syensqo, Hexcel, others, I hope you’re listening here. This, at least from my perspective, could be the future of your business and what could keep you at the forefront of this business for the foreseeable future.
That’s about it for this week. My apologies if this post comes off as a bit preachy, but as you may be able to tell by now, I’m fairly passionate about this and I want this industry to survive and prosper long into the future. Anyway, I hope everyone that is in the business and reads this at least starts to think about it. All it will take is a few enterprising and forward thinking company executives and this will become a reality.
As usual I will post this first on my website – www.nedpatton.com – as well as on LinkedIn. And if anyone wants to provide comments to this, I welcome them with open arms. Comments, criticisms, etc. are all quite welcome. I really do want to engage in a conversation with all of you about composites because we can learn so much from each other as long as we share our own perspectives.
I also wanted to let everyone know that I have finished going through my edit of the first draft of my second book. This one is about what I have been writing in these newsletters for the last 6 months or so – sustainability of composites and a path to the future that does not include using fossil fuels for either the raw materials or the process energy to make composites. McFarland is going to pick this one up as well. I am actually under contract with them for the book. My ingoing title is “Close the Circle, a Roadmap to Composite Materials Sustainability”. Now the slog to the finish while I prepare the manuscript along with all of the figures, etc. in the manner that McFarland needs to have it to produce the book. That will probably take me past the end of this year, so the book will most likely come out late next summer or early fall next year.
Finally, I still need to plug my first book, so here’s the plug. The book pretty much covers the watershed in composites, starting with a brief history of composites, then introducing the Periodic Table and why Carbon is such an important and interesting element. The book was published and made available a year ago in August, and is available both on Amazon and from McFarland Books – my publisher. However, the best place to get one is to go to my website and buy one. I will send you a signed copy for the same price you would get charged on Amazon, except that I charge $8 shipping. Anyway, here’s the link to get your signed copy: https://www.nedpatton.com/product-page/the-string-and-glue-of-our-world-signed-copy. And as usual, here’s a picture of the book cover.
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