DSM partners with Roquette and Elevance

DSM recently made partnership deals with Roquette to build a biobased succinic acid plant and with Elevance to develop biobased thermoplastics from Elevance’s monomers.

Once completed (estimated 2012) it will be one of Europe’s biggest biobased succinic acid plants.The plant, to be built at Roquette’s Cassano facility in Italy, will produce 10 thousand tons of biobased succinic acid a year by yeast-fermentation. Renewable starch derivatives will be used as feedstock. Interestingly, the manufacturing process absorbs CO2 and does not produce a number of side products common to succinic acid manucacture; DSM claim that this is the only succinic acid production process that does so. The decision to build the plant follows a joint venture in 2010 in which the two companies paired to build a demonstration facility in France which was quite successful. This plant would establish DSM/Roquette alongside Bioamber as one of the big biobased succinic acid players. The two companies are establishing a joint venture named Reverdia for future activities.
DSM have also partnered with Elevance to explore use of Elevance’s biobased monomer technology to produce a portfolio of high performance thermoplastics. Elevance use plant derived oils to produce a range of monomers and DSM will provide their polymer expertise to develop and commercialize products.