MN Corn-supported bioacrylic acid effort reports milestone
Above: Acrylic acid is used in manufacturing numerous consumer products, like plastics and paint bases.
Written by Jonathan Eisenthal
A breakthrough has been announced by a Minnesota Corn-supported startup company producing a valuable plastic material precursor out of renewable sources like field corn.
In January, Låkril Technologies reported that it achieved yields higher than 90% when transforming lactic acid — which is derived from corn — into acrylic acid. The public is familiar with acrylic acid primarily as the base material for many paints and adhesives, and its use in numerous consumer products, including diapers.
Låkril, which was founded through discoveries made at the University of Minnesota’s Center for Sustainable Polymers, is the first company to reach the 90% threshold. When the conversion rate is less than 90%, there is a higher cost and more risk in producing acrylic acid from lactic acid than from petroleum, its current base material.
Acrylic acid is a $10 billion market, and over 6.5 million metric tons are produced annually, according to Låkril President Chris Nicholas, who co-founded the company with Paul Dauenhauer, the Lanny & Charlotte Schmidt Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Minnesota.
The current petrochemical acrylic acid production process emits 16 million tons of carbon dioxide into earth’s atmosphere every year. The bio-derived lactic acid could cut those emissions by as much as 80%, according to Nicholas.
Bio-based acrylic acid could also increase corn demand. Låkril estimates that an average acrylic acid production facility could use upwards of 3 million bushels of corn annually.
“We could replace all of the acrylic acid that is produced in the world today by using about 5% of the U.S. corn harvest,” Nicholas said. “This is part of our larger vision that envisions a world where bio-based sugars are used as the feedstock to produce low-carbon chemicals.”
Rapid course toward commercialization
Currently, Låkril has only used its catalyst to produce acrylic acid on a small scale. Nicholas said the company is working to produce enough of its catalyst to support an average-sized acrylic acid plant by 2025.
Nicholas points out that production of bio-derived acrylic acid is well-suited to the Upper Midwest.
“There is a very good overlap between where domestic sugar sources are grown — corn fields around the greater Midwest, Minnesota being a very good location — and the acrylics production facilities where the final formulations are prepared,” Nicholas said. “Lactic acid is already produced at large scale today on the Iowa/Nebraska border from corn derived sugars. At the same time, many paints and coatings markets are headquartered and quite concentrated across the Upper Midwest. Oftentimes that’s because these are aqueous formulations — no one wants to ship water any further than necessary.”
In the Midwest, major producers and users of acrylic acid and its derivatives include: H.B. Fuller, 3M, Henkel, Valspar, and Axalta Coatings.
While large industrial companies like these may license the process and take it all the way from raw material to finished product, Nicholas foresees an exciting opportunity for value-added agriculture operations in small-town Minnesota to diversify their revenue stream by adding lactic acid to their repertoire.
Nicholas said, “One of the opportunities we are evaluating is to convert an ethanol plant into a lactic acid biorefinery, which then could install our technology as a relatively simple add-on. Then, you can produce ethanol, lactic acid, acrylic acid. You become very much a biorefinery with access to multiple downstream markets.”
Minnesota Corn supports Låkril as part of our mission of creating new markets for corn farmers while increasing sustainability and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Minnesota Corn also invests corn check-off funds in projects at the Center for Sustainable Polymers that aim to develop future generations of corn-based plastics. To learn more about how Minnesota Corn is working to increase opportunities for corn farmers through new-uses projects, visit mncorn.org/utilization.
