Biotechnological and Chemical Production of Monomers from Renewable Raw Materials

Abstract

AbstractThe demand for sustainable chemical products that exhibit a low product carbon footprint and that are biobased and/or biodegradable has tremendously increased. This can be observed in many applications like home and personal care, packaging, or engineering plastics. Many customer industries of the chemical industry want to replace their petroleum-based monomers, chemical building blocks, and ingredients by renewables-based ones. Furthermore, there is the need to reduce microplastics in the environment, which can be achieved by substitution of conventional polymers by biodegradable polymers that are – in the best case – even biobased. Moreover, there is substantial political pressure to reduce green-house-gas (GHG) emissions as stipulated by the green deal of the European Union. All these developments enforce a fundamental change of energy supply, raw material base, and production technologies within the chemical industry.The supply of customer industries with biobased products forces the chemical industry to include renewable raw materials to a large extent. This requires new chemical or biotechnological conversion strategies. First generation renewables like sugar and plant oil are existing commodities and are already used within the chemical industry. Advanced renewable raw materials also known as second generation renewables comprise lignocellulose, agricultural residues, food wastes, other organic waste, or seaweed. They have a great potential as future raw material as they are considered even more sustainable.The utilization of renewable raw material is based on value chains completely different from the current petrochemical value chain. Firstly, the structurally complex raw biomass is refined to specified raw material like carbohydrates or plant oil by separation and purification technologies. Secondly, this specified raw material is converted into chemical products using chemical synthesis or biotechnology. An example that is already used at a commercial scale is the biomass balance approach, the feeding of “bio-naphtha” into the steam-cracker. It makes use of existing assets and can quickly deliver drop-in products declared as biobased. However, it cannot deliver products with traceable 14C-carbon. In contrast to biomass balance, many chemical end products containing traceable 14C-carbon are obtained through direct conversion of specified renewable raw material by biotechnology or chemistry. Several examples for alcohols, diols, organic acids, and amines are discussed in this chapter.KeywordsChemical synthesisFermentationMetabolic engineeringRenewable raw materials