SBIR Phase II: Scalable Production of Platform Chemicals from Inedible Biomass and Carbon Dioxide

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The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project is to enable cost-competitive, high-volume production of useful chemicals and materials from abundant and sustainable feedstocks. This project is developing a process to manufacture a chemical known as FDCA (furan-2,5-dicarboxylic acid) from carbon dioxide and a commodity feedstock made from inedible biomass. FDCA is a naturally occurring substance and is used to make polymers (i.e., plastics) that have superior performance compared to analogous polymers produced today from fossil fuel feedstocks. The obstacle to producing these polymers is that it has been complicated and prohibitively expensive to produce FDCA. The competing technologies for making FDCA require edible sugar as the feedstock and a very large number of process steps, resulting in high manufacturing costs. This project proposes to produce this chemical using a dramatically simplified process, which enables cost-competitive production. By advancing the technology toward commercial application, this project will have a far-reaching impact on US economic competitiveness and innovation in the chemical industry. With a secure FDCA supply, US chemical and materials companies can develop manufacturing capacity for polymers with an ultimate market opportunity of $100 billion. In addition, replacing energy- and emissions-intensive fossil fuel-derived polymers with these more environmentally friendly polymers will reduce emissions of multiple economic sectors. Finally, these polymers have favorable end-of-use options that will reduce plastic waste and its accumulation in the environment.This SBIR Phase II project proposes to advance the technology for a key step of the FDCA production process to a level that enables its implementation in a pilot-scale demonstration. The reaction under investigation is the aerobic oxidation of furfural to furan-2-carboxylate (furoate) under aqueous alkaline conditions. Oxidizing furfural under industrially relevant conditions (high concentration and high rates) is fundamentally challenging because furfural is prone to rapid degradation processes. Studies of the process in the earlier Phase I project provided key insights into the reaction mechanism and identified two potential reactor designs for continuous operation. The Phase II project will compare performance in these two reactor designs, scale up the preferred design, validate catalyst lifetime, and demonstrate integration of the reaction product into the downstream steps of this FDCA process. Successful completion of the project will finalize the reactor design for the oxidation unit operation in a pilot demonstration. In addition to advancing this technology toward commercialization, the project will create new knowledge to enable broader utilization of renewable feedstocks for chemical production by providing insights into catalyst selection, process conditions, and reactor designs for aqueous aerobic oxidation reactions.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.