Entropy Resins Widens its Scope in Composites Markets with Bioepoxy

Entropy Resins is bringing its Super Sap bio-based epoxy to market to give companies more options when it comes to high quality green materials to use in composite products.

In the US, the market for epoxy stands at $5 billion and $15 billion globally. As the sole producer of bioderived epoxy and with growing concerns for the environmental impact of products, Entropy looks well set for growth.

Lead Applications Engineer for Entropy, states Desi Banatao:

"With new industry standards and government legislation focused on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and maximizing the sustainability of our natural resources, we feel there are further opportunities for our bio-based technology."

Entropy’s technology allows them to produce the starting chemicals for epoxy manufacture from bio-based feedstocks, resulting in a product which is sustainable and has lower CO2 emissions than from petroleum feedstocks.

Entropy's lead biochemist, Rey Banatao:

"By sharing bio-renewable feed stocks with other industries, like the paper pulp and bio-fuels industries, and using manufacturing processes that require less energy and water we can significantly reduce the carbon footprint of our resins. Considering resins can be more than 50% of the volume in a composite structure, these savings can be environmentally significant."

Some of Entropy’s biggest buyers have been manufacturers of sports equipment; in 2010 the company formed partnerships with a number of surfboard, skateboard and ski manufacturers. Niche Snowboards is one such company. Niche now use SuperSap in their whole line of snowboards. Dustin Morrell, the CEO of Niche, said that while they had been eager to improve how environmentally friendly their product is, before Entropy’s bio-epoxy they hadn’t encountered a green product that could stand up to the level of physical stress needed to make the grade in one of their snowboards.

This year, however, Entropy is branching out into the wider composites market and meeting demands for high performance biodegradable products. They are expanding into supplying their bio-epoxy to the wind power, transport and civil engineering sectors. Typically these sectors use non-renewable or energy intense resources such as metal or a plethora of high performance plastics.Often the reason manufacturers stick to these materials is the same reason as why Niche didn’t use green composites earlier; strict demands for high performance. To aid this expansion, Entropy will be launching a line of coatings and adhesives aimed at the construction industry and also resin infusion systems that will make it easier to make large composite parts (such as wind turbine blades) with their technology.

BASF expands into Germany to increase its Ecoflex production capacity

BASF begins construction of a plant for producing its Ecoflex biodegradable plastic in Germany.

President of BASF's Performance Polymers division, Dr. Wolfgang Hapke:

"We are already successful in the market with our biodegradable polyester Ecoflex and the related innovation, Ecovio. The larger production capacities will enhance our position significantly. The capacity expansion will also enable us to respond even more effectively to our customers' wishes."

Ecoflex is much like polyethylene, but within a few weeks in industrial composting facilities it will completely biodegrade without leaving behind any residue. It is not strictly speaking a bioplastic: it is produced from biodegradable synthetic polymers. Ecovio however, is produced from 75% Polylactic acid (PLA) which is derived from corn and is therefore biorenewable. Both plastics are commonly used in packaging applications such as shopping bags, food packaging agricultural mulch films. 

The new plant will be built in Ludwigshafen, Germany. Once completed, the new plant will increase BASF’s production capacity for producing Ecoflex from 14,000 to 74,000 metric tons per year. BASF will also step up its production of Ecovio, its renewable Ecoflex derivative. Annually, the market for biodegradable polymers is growing 20%. BASF is already one of the world’s largest suppliers of biodegradable and bio-sourced plastics and this boost to production output will place the company well to compete in the growing European bioplastics market in coming years.

EPA approves the use of E15 in older cars: Analysis of the pros and cons

With a waiver for the Clean Air Act, the EPA recently approved E15 biofuel for use in cars made within the last ten years rather than only in cars made from 2007 onwards, a move that’s proving controversial, but is approval based only the age of the vehicle the best option?

On one side, one camp wants the EPA to approve E15 for use in even older cars than is currently allowed so that biofuels see wider use (with the change in the regulations approximately 62% of cars on US roads will be clear to use E15). The other is concerned about the performance and safety of E15 in petrol engines, as well as the usual concerns over food production and carbon emissions from the anti-biofuel camp. Both perspectives have important points to make.

As a chemical, hydrocarbon-chain fuels (such as gasoline) are very stable; apart from the fact that they burn well they have very few other reactions. In fact the word paraffin (the fuel I believe you call kerosene in the US) means “barely reactive”. This makes it fairly straight forward to build engines that won’t be corroded by the fuel. Alcohols are more reactive, which can potentially cause a problem. Alcohols can react with components in the engine; not quickly, but over time they will cause more wear and tear on the engine compared to one run on conventional gasoline. With E85, the engines are designed to handle high amounts of alcohol in the fuel. With E10 fuel, the alcohol in the mix is dilute so engine damage isn’t really an issue. There comes a point in blending though where the engine is going to suffer from the levels of alcohol in the mix. The big question here is whether this point is reached when the ethanol content of the fuel is increased to 15%. 

Some people opposed to the change are also worried over misfuelling; that people will be confused by the change and damage their cars by putting in the wrong fuel. The change in E15 regulations comes with requirements for clear labeling at the pump to minimise this risk, though there will most likely still be some cases of misfuelling.

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson made the conclusion over E15 with the help of research done by the DoE “Recently completed testing and data analysis show that E15 does not harm emissions control equipment in newer cars and light trucks. Wherever sound science and the law support steps to allow more home-grown fuels in America's vehicles, this administration takes those steps."

Is determining the cutoff by year of manufacture alone the best method for determining which vehicles are suitable for fuelling with E15 however? There was no global change in automotive manufacturing methods in 2001, so the placement of this cutoff to some extent arbitrary, though a lot of data from the performance of engines over time with E15 was analysed by the DoE. The DoE has also only approved E15 for use in cars; it has not been approved in vehicles such as trucks and motorbikes for a lack of experimental data, showing that they have researched the issue in detail. However, the limit isn’t a rolling limit, (e.g. vehicles produced in the last X number of years rather than vehicles produced after year X), so concern over running “old worn engines” on ethanol fuel seemingly isn’t the reasoning for the limit being what it is. We might expect more variation in performance between engines from different manufacturers than from engines produced in consecutive years.

What would be ideal to my mind would be to approve cars for E15 use based on the model of the car and the year; actually testing the engine to see how the higher levels of ethanol in the fuel would affect it as it ages, though this would take more time and resources which at present would be impractical. Because of the ethanol blending wall, there has been pressure to get the restrictions lifted and for the sake of the growth of the ethanol industry it would be best if this wall was not reached; a market that can’t grow will hardly attract investors. So how would it be best for this to be approached? Determining which vehicles are suitable based on their age is the most straightforward method to enforce, though it might be that some suitable vehicles are not approved for E15 and some that are not suitable will be fuelled with E15. Perhaps if technical departments of individual automotive manufacturers were asked to have a hand in an approval process made on a manufacturer by manufacturer basis, it would be a relatively simple way to find an easily enforceable limit that reflects technical differences between engines.

DoD challenged over biofuel policy, but says that it is still committed to funding biofuel development.

The US Department of Defense has invested a great deal in developing alternative fuels: a new study says that greener fuels won’t give the military an advantage, but the DoD disagrees.

The DoD has set some ambitious targets for alternative fuel use; the Air Force is aiming to use 50% alternative fuel for all of its domestic flights and has financed several projects to develop bio-jet fuel.
The Navy set targets to use 50% alternative fuel across its operations by 2020. DARPA announced last year that it had managed to produce algal biofuel for $2 a gallon and was working to push this down as low as $1 a gallon. As the organization in the world that uses the largest amount of fuel (337,000 barrels a day), the DoD push for alternative fuels is one of the largest. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been invested, but a new study from Rand corp. says that using renewable fuels don’t give the military an advantage over using fossil fuel.

The independent study by Rand Corp makes the case that with first generation biofuel technologies it would take up 10% of farmland in the US to produce 200,000 barrels of fuel. This is just one percent of the fuel used in the US a day. The writers of the study claim that there is no advantage to the US military to use biofuel rather than petroleum based fuel, due to the intensive farming and processing needed, use of biofuels might not result in greener or cheaper fuel. However, the study acknowledges the knock on effects of technology developments might benefit the general public; a comparison was made to technology developed for space missions resulting in better miniaturization of computers.

However, the DoD disagrees with the study’s claims that there are no benefits to the military funding biofuel research. Most of the investment to date has been in food crop derived biofuel, so if these technologies are relied upon, food production will be displaced. These are the established technologies, but the DoD has also financed non-food crop derived biofuel development and some of these projects are approaching commercialization which are aiming to mitigate the problems with current technology. The higher costs of these new technologies are because they are still at the R&D stage and the DoD claims that market forces and economy of scale will bring down these prices in time; biofuel trials carried out by the Navy have decreased in cost by 50% in the last two years.     

The cost and environmental benefits are not the only benefits the DoD cites; they claim that reducing US dependence on overseas oil has advantages to national security. The DoD stress that they remain committed to supporting alternative fuels despite the study and will continue to finance their development.

GM Biofuel Eucalyptus Held Up in Court

ArborGen’s GM eucalyptus tree, intended for use as a biofuel feedstock, has been held back from commercialization by legal action from critics.

The tree produced by the company would ideally be used for producing cellulosic bioethanol; its development comes as part of efforts to move away from food crops being used for biofuel production. The genetically modified eucalyptus tree has been engineered to grow more comfortably in colder climates than it usually does.

While ArborGen were seeking approval for the new tree however, the Sierra Club and other critics took legal action to force the USDA do more thorough environmental impact assessments.. They are concerned about it becoming a “super-weed,” proliferating across forests, consuming too much water.

There are regulations in place to prevent GM organisms from becoming “super-weeds” or “super-pests” in the wild. However, critics think these requirements don’t go far enough, while many proponents think that the requirements are too high and are stifling the development of important new technology, and that the government is hindering its own goals for 21 billion gallons of non-food derived ethanol a year by 2022. As it stands, getting regulatory approval for just field testing a new GM crop (let alone commercializing it) is difficult.

Biodegradable Polymers Market to Reach $3 billion globally by 2015, According to a New Report by Global Industry Analysts.

GIA has released a report on Biodegradable Polymers markets; they predict that the global market for Biodegradable Polymers is forecast to reach $3 billion by the year 2015. They claim the growth is being driven by increasing costs of petrochemical feedstocks, preference for cheap renewable feedstocks and greater efforts over environmental concerns such as CO2 emissions and pollution.

The GIA report “Biodegradable Polymers: A Global Strategic Business Report” covers current market trends/activity, growth factors, new products and profiles on market players. Estimates and projections for the market between 2007 and 2015 were made in various markets around the world broken down by market segment and polymer type.

Most plastic products are disposable; within a few weeks most plastic products are sent to land-fill sites, or simply pollute the natural environment. Non-biodegradable plastic bags are the number-one offender here, often being used just once and thrown away. They were the first common application for replacing with biodegradable alternatives, but now this changeover is starting to spread to other sectors, such as the electronics sector and healthcare. As the applications for biodegradable plastics have diversified, interest in them has soared from customers and companies. They are becoming more economically competitive in comparison to petrochemical derived plastics.

Most of the market for biodegradable plastics is represented in Europe, according to the report however, landfill prices in the US are rising and there may be significant growth ahead here for the US biodegradable polymers market in coming years. In Asia, the biodegradable plastics industry is likely to grow strongly in countries such as China and Japan, countries which are making efforts to use more eco-friendly products. The report concludes that biodegradable plastics growth is limited in so called loose-fill packaging applications because there are other preferable materials in use here already. There are other applications that are better suited for growth; compost bags, for one.

Polylactic acid and Co-polyester biopolymers are the most common biodegradable polymers in use, followed by starch based polymers. The report names a number of big players in biodegradable polymers; for example, BASF, Cereplast, Dupont, ECM BioFilms and NatureWorks.

UK based Biofuels firm Ensus rids itself of a bad smell

UK based Ensus has set aside £6m to rid itself of a bad smell which caused complaints from residents.

Ensus specializes in bioethanol production from cereal crops. The plant opened at the Wilton Centre in the UK in 2009 produces over 400 million liters of bioethanol a year. Shortly after the plant opened however, residents living near the plant complained about a brewery-like smell from the fermentation step of the process.

In a statement from the Environment Agency:
"Smells from Ensus have been reported to us since March 2010. In September 2010, following enforcement action from the agency, Ensus announced it would be spending £6m ($9.6m) on regenerative thermal oxidisers to minimise smells. Before this can happen, Ensus must apply to the Environment Agency to change its environmental permit. We are giving residents the chance to comment and raise any concerns they have, including noise, effect on air quality and odour."

The company recognizes the issue and say that they are trying to deal with the problem. Concerns over the efficiency, output, impacts on food production and environmental impacts over a process can sometimes push more minor issues like smell and  to the background, but it is still important for biotech companies to consider impacts of their operations on residents. The fact that biotech uses living organisms and degradation of biomass means that it is more susceptible to problems with smell than other technologies. Regulations can be strict depending on jurisdiction regarding the effect that operations have on residents, and is something that may be regulated more harshly as industrial biotech grows and expectations of the technology rise.