By MATTHEW D. ERNST

Missouri Correspondent

ANAHEIM, Calif. — If two projects recognized by the National Corn Growers Assoc. (NCGA) stay on schedule, biobased ingredients from corn could be used to make common plastic beverage bottles, mayonnaise jars and other containers lining the aisles of U.S. food stores.

The projects, from the Iowa Corn Promotion Board and Chicago-based Annikki, LLC, were among six recognized by NCGA in its inaugural Consider Corn Challenge. Selected from 33 entrants, each winning project received a $25,000 award and recognition from NCGA at this year’s Commodity Classic in Anaheim.

Here is a closer look at two of those projects; each could help bring into the mainstream biobased plastics, derived from ingredients manufactured from corn.

“The ability to produce economically competitive, bio-advantaged molecules, compared to traditional petrochemicals, is driving many companies to review how corn can play a larger role in their future procurement strategy,” said NCGA Director of Market Development Jim Bauman.

Plastics ABCs: PET and PEF

Ortwin Ertl has a last name familiar to many in American agriculture, but the Austrian CEO of Annikki is not aware of any family relation to the famous farm toy manufacturer. “Although Ertl is not a common name in Austria, I’m not aware of any direct connection,” he said. “But that question has come up as we have conversations with farmers in the U.S., and it is a nice connection.”

Annikki, which does business in the United States as Chicago-based Annikki, LLC, received a Consider Corn Challenge award for technology that paves the way for making FDCA (furandicarboxylic acid) from corn. The FDCA is a replacement for a petroleum-derived acid used to make plastic bottles, fibers and nylons.

A big target market for Annikki’s technology are containers made from PET plastic, or “#1 PET,” commonly used in soda bottles and other plastic containers. The company’s corn-derived, biobased FDCA can be used to make polyethylene furanoate (PEF) plastic. There are ongoing efforts by plastics manufacturers to replace #1 PET with PEF, especially for beverage bottles.

Like today’s standard #1 PET bottles, PEF containers are also fully recyclable. But PEF advocates, like Ertl, point to advantages PEF may offer over #1 PET. “Our technology creates a PEF that has 10 times as good an oxygen barrier and five times as good a CO2 (carbon dioxide) barrier as PET. The PEF is fully recyclable and can be hot-filled. Even beer can be filled in PEF plastic bottles.”

Ertl, who founded Annikki on a vision that biomass products rather than oil-based products are the future, said using biobased products has advantages beyond eliminating petrochemicals from the consumer goods supply chain.

“The compounds which you find in oil are not reactive – they’re simple, naked hydrocarbons that have to be connected together (to make useful products),” he explained.

There are various costs associated with connecting those hydrocarbons together. Biobased chemicals, like Annikki’s FDCA, could help save on those costs of manufacturing. “We’re on target to manufacture PEF at roughly the same price as PET, and we should be able to make it cheaper,” said John Bump, Chicago CEO of Annikki, LLC.

The outlook for Annikki’s FDCA is good, but there is still work to be done. “We are scaling it up to pilot scale. It will take at least two years to start the industrialization process” for PEF made from the chemical derived from corn, said Bump.

He said entering the Consider Corn Challenge was a change of pace for the company. “Annikki never really sought publicity before, so winning this contest is the first real publicity we’ve had,” he said.

Ertl said the U.S. is the company’s most important market, and he is excited for the opportunities the Challenge award provides for reaching out to American corn farmers. “I think there are new opportunities to be realized for U.S. corn, beyond its present uses,” he said.

The NCGA hopes projects like Annikki’s technology will appeal to U.S. companies and create new demand for corn. “Continued improvements in sustainable corn production underscore corn’s ability to significantly improve the environmental footprint of many common household products,” said Bruce Peterson, chair of NCGA’s Feed, Food & Industrial Action Team.

A corn-based MEG

The Iowa Corn Promotion Board (ICPB) received a Consider Corn Challenge award for an entry that also met NCGA’s charge to reduce reliance on petrochemicals.

“MEG, or monoethylene glycol, is a commodity chemical used around the world today, primarily used to make plastic used for soda bottles, water bottles and polyester textiles. It’s also used as antifreeze used in passenger and commercial vehicles,” said Alex Buck, ICPB’s Industrial Innovation manager.

He said the idea to make MEG from corn started with Iowa growers. “They started this idea and we started looking for chemicals (that could be made from corn) with the team of our consultants. MEG rose to the top,” he explained. “We conceived the idea and the process of how to make this from corn glucose, based on our discussions in our meetings with our consultants and our growers. The research is currently done in West Virginia at our contract engineering firm, MATRIC.”

There’s a ready market. “The (global) MEG market is 62 billion pounds,” said Rodney Williamson, director of ICPB Research and Development. “We’re not going to take over the 62 billion-pound market with corn. But there is going to be an opportunity for a renewable going into this petrochemical market.

“But the (worldwide) growth in MEG is about 4 percent per year, and that growth would be equivalent to about 94 million bushels (of corn).”

The process to make MEG from corn uses components already commonly available from wet-milled corn. “It would be much like ethanol in that ethanol uses the starch. It would come out of an existing wet mill plant. We would pick it up from there,” said Williamson.

The attraction of corn-based MEG is that it is a ready replacement for existing plastics manufacturing. “Our MEG will be a drop-in chemical, which means that other than being biobased, it will be no different than what’s on the market,” said Buck. “There is currently a market now, people currently utilizing biobased MEG in bottles. So our first target is to get it into that market where there is already use of biobased MEG, and then grow from there.”

The product is in the development phase. “We’re trying to get to a point where we can design the pilot plant,” he noted. “A pilot is something that really needs to be done and needs to be thought out well in order to make sure that the final process is something that can be commercialized.”

ICPB’s project also provides a corn-based ingredient used across the plastics manufacturing spectrum. The biobased MEG can be dropped into the process for making both PET and PEF plastics. “Both of those need MEG in order to be a plastic. Since both of those need MEG, we feel we can work with both avenues – the PET and the PEF,” said Buck.

The goal is to license the process, to make corn-derived MEG, to drive corn demand, he added. “We have three patents that have published, two granted and one published, and we utilize those in order to drive adoption and commercialization of our process. Because our No. 1 goal is to grind more corn, and see something commercialized that the growers can see the benefit in the demand for their products.”

Other winners

According to NCGA, the Consider Corn Challenge entrants reinforced that the crop can improve the environmental footprint of many products used by consumers, including plastic bottles, acrylics, solvents, fibers, packaging and coolants. Many of the submissions included bio-advantaged molecules, with the ability to deliver performance and value that exceeds petrochemicals.

Four other companies each received the $25,000 Consider Corn Challenge award as well. Lygos, a biotechnology company in California, is producing Bio-Malonic acid (Bio-MA) from renewable sugars using cutting-edge biotechnology. Malonic acid is used in products including high-tech composites and coatings, electronics, flavors, fragrances and pharmaceuticals.

Most malonic acid is made in China from petroleum, through an expensive process that employs hazardous chemicals, according to NCGA. Lygos announced in November a successful pilot plant production of Bio-Malonic at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Lygos’ system uses nontoxic chemicals and mild conditions resulting in an environmentally friendly process with superior economics that can be deployed in the United States.

A Minnesota company, Sasya, received an award for its work on a biobased acid made from ethanol co-products. It is producing methylmalonic acid, to compete in methyl methacrylate markets for making acrylic glass, and adhesives. This is not the company’s only effort to use ethanol co-products; Sasya received a 2017 USDA grant for $100,000 to produce fish meal using carbon dioxide from ethanol plants.

South Dakota State University received an award for research on using “renewable precursors such as glycerol and lactic acid to make unsaturated polyester resins (UPRs),” according to NCGA. Glycerol and lactic acid can be produced during the fermentation process, and there is apparently potential for making biobased products from those.

“Today’s UPRs are used to make large plastic tanks, as a binder in fiber glass sheets and other reinforced plastics,” stated the NCGA.

Finally, Vertimass, an Irvine, Calif., company, received an award for its work on commercial-scale options that can transform corn ethanol into hydrocarbon fuels. The company’s first effort involves making jet fuel from corn ethanol, using technology developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratories in Tennessee.