Decarbonizing Chemicals in the Global Energy Transition
Credit: Dall-E
Decarbonizing Chemicals in the Global Energy Transition
Written by Noah Helman, PhD, CEO. Industrial Microbes invents new sustainable manufacturing methods using synthetic biology and partners with the world’s leading chemical producers to bring them to market.
Take a look around you, and it will be difficult to find objects that are untouched by the oil and petrochemical industry. Plastics, synthetic clothing, paints, coatings, diapers, and synthetic rubber are all made from oil. Objects made of glass or metal are delivered on diesel-powered trucks with packaging made from oil. The strawberries on my table were grown with fertilizers (made from natural gas) and pesticides (made from petrochemicals) and then flown from South America on a plane burning jet fuel (made from oil).
For more than a century, oil has powered almost every industry and has provided the feedstock for a revolution in materials. The abundance and low cost of oil have made it indispensable for our global economy. But over the coming decade, the oil industry will shrink, and we’re just now coming to grips with the implications.
Over the years, many people have predicted the end of oil, assumed to be due to limited supply. There is, after all, a finite amount of oil in the ground. Instead, it appears that the oil industry will wither (or possibly collapse) due to falling demand, as the economics of renewable energy and “the electrification of everything” will outcompete oil on price and quality. Oil has dominated for so long and enabled so many applications and products, that the domino effects of its demise will be felt throughout the entire economy.
The Global Energy Transition has begun in earnest. The past five years were like the time before a race when sprinters are stretching, preparing, and getting their feet in the blocks. And 2022 was the starter’s pistol. Due to its share of global carbon emissions, most articles on the Energy Transition have focused on the transportation and power generation sectors. This series of articles will look at decarbonizing the hard-to-abate chemicals and materials sector, which accounts for about 6% of global warming.
Summary: Green electricity is going to get very cheap, and all energy-adjacent industries will be forced to adapt. By 2030, cheap electricity will sharply increase the cost of petrochemicals, for reasons discussed in Part I. Chemical producers will have to make large, significantly greener, long-term investments to meet the growing demand.
In 2022, four major forces have aligned to set the stage for the decarbonization of chemicals and materials (Part I). Industrial biotechnology enables efficient green chemical production, and will take advantage of very low cost electricity (Part II). However, cost has historically been a barrier. New technologies in bioprocessing are addressing this challenge directly, with an initial focus on cutting the largest cost: feedstock prices. A handful of low-cost feedstock options are emerging as the Energy Transition and Circular Economy take shape (Part III). Converting these abundant low-cost feedstocks into useful products will require the ability to run efficient gas fermentation processes. The last decade has seen commercial-scale gas fermentation installed around the world (Part IV). Waste methane is a common currency of the natural degradation of organic matter, and it is also a potent greenhouse gas. Capturing waste methane as a feedstock for gas fermentation is a huge opportunity to expand the slate of carbon-negative chemicals and materials (Part V). Finally, to have a sizable impact on fighting climate change, these technologies must be implemented as broadly as possible across the chemicals industry. Reviewing the strategies of climate tech companies in the past is instructive for selecting the most effective strategy to rapidly scale in today’s world (Part VI).
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About us
Industrial Microbes is developing carbon-negative materials to enable the transition to a circular economy and to reduce the carbon footprint of the chemical industry. We build microorganisms that make chemicals and materials from methane, a greenhouse gas 81x as potent as CO2. Our team has been working to decarbonize chemical production for decades and this series of articles will share our perspective on the massive changes we see coming.