The Future of Biobased Chemicals

The replacement of crude oil‐derived chemicals with biobased chemicals is both a technical and economic challenge. From a technical perspective the challenge is how to selectively remove oxygen from a highly oxygenated substrates. However, the economic challenge is even more significant in that the biobased chemicals must compete against a highly efficient petrochemical production system. The serial approach of targeting one biobased chemical product at a time, which is the most common technical approach, is both time intensive and expensive. To mitigate costs, a need exists to develop a technological framework in which a range of biobased chemicals can be produced from a common platform. One such generalized platform being developed by the NSF Engineering Research Center for Biorenewable Chemicals ( CBiRC ) , depends on the exploitation of the fatty acid/polyketide metabolic pathway leading to a diversity of intermediate chemicals that are subsequently converted to chemical products using chemical catalysts. An overview of the technical strategy being used by CBiRC to achieve a generalized chemical production platform will be discussed using several specific examples involving varying chain length carboxylic acids and triacetic acid lactone (TAL). The TAL system will be discussed in greater technical depth to demonstrate the power of biological and chemical catalyst researchers interacting.