Dupont Goes Bio

From an article by Claudia H. Deutsch in the NY Times:

E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Company, unlike most chemical companies, has moved the quest for bio-based raw materials off the wish list and onto the to-do agenda. The company has allocated nearly 10 percent of its $1.3 billion research budget to extracting ingredients from carbohydrates... DuPont already makes 10 percent of its products from nonpetrochemical substances, and Charles O. Holliday Jr., DuPont's chief executive, expects to increase that to 25 percent by 2010... DuPont is working with the Energy Department to turn corn plants - the husks, the ears, the stems, everything - into vehicular fuel. DuPont is close to developing plant-based hair dyes and nail polishes that will not adhere to skin, surgical bio-glues that can stanch internal bleeding and a textile fiber made from sugar that will act and feel like cotton. This spring DuPont will open a factory in Loudon, Tenn., that will make propane diol - trademarked as Sorona - from glucose. For now the output is earmarked for carpet fiber, but DuPont is exploring whether it can work in rigid plastics for automobile interiors or de-icing compounds for airplanes. The company has already converted many labs that once worked on pharmaceuticals or textiles - two businesses DuPont has shed - to now search for ingredients to replace oil and gas. Next year, it plans to cluster them all in one building and move a marketing staff in with them. "Industrial biotechnology is an area in which we can differentiate ourselves, so we're spending a lot more than any other company on it," said Thomas M. Connelly, DuPont's chief science officer. DuPont's optimism has other chemical industry executives scratching their heads. Dow Chemical pulled out of a joint venture with Cargill to make polylactic acid, a component of food packaging, from corn. Eastman Chemical sold its stake in Genencor International, a leader in industrial biotechnology. "We really do believe that industrial biotech is critical to our evolution, but the technologies of the foreseeable future just do not give the returns we expect from our research dollar," said Andrew N. Liveris, chief executive of Dow, which is looking for ways to make polyurethane from soybean oil, but has put a higher priority on extracting ingredients from coal. Friedhelm Balkenhohl, senior vice president for bio-catalysis research at the BASF Corporation, echoes that view. "Raw material change is one of our hot topics, but even 10 years from now, renewables will account for less than 10 percent of our ingredients," he said. Some companies are shrugging off bio-based ingredients entirely, and concentrating solely on using petroleum ingredients more efficiently. "I'm glad that larger companies are spending their time, talent and money in such exotic areas, because they have left a wide-open field for us that we are fully exploiting," said Jeffrey M. Lipton, chief executive of the Nova Chemicals Corporation, which makes building-block chemicals like styrene and polyethylene.