SABIC is committed to sustainability, says sustainability manager Bert Groothuis. “We focus on reducing the footprint of our operations and on supplying our customers with sustainability enabling products.” CatchBio supports the company's ambitions well.
SABIC is a leading manufacturer of chemicals, plastics, fertilizers, and metals.“By reducing our water use and developing energy efficient production processes, we try to minimize our own footprint”, says Bert Groothuis. “And by developing more sustainable products, such as new products for the automotive industry based on upcycled polyethylene terephtalate bottles, we help our clients become more sustainable.” The opportunities of biomass are interesting to SABIC, says Bert Groothuis. “Take for instance the production of biomass based aromatic chemicals. Today this is still economically unattractive as well as energy inefficient. Production requires very high temperatures and pressures, whereas yield is low. These problems must be addressed before we can choose a biobased production process over fossil based production. The CatchBio programme may help us achieve this.”
Challenge
The CatchBio public private partnership is an interesting opportunity. “The programme brings together a number of renowned Dutch universities and knowledge institutes that can really make a difference in this field”, says Groothuis, who is also a member of the CatchBio management team. “We are confident that the programme will result in proof of concepts for the various steps towards biobased production of for instance aromatic chemicals.” This is however no certainty.
“As programme management team we must encourage universities to see the bigger picture apart from the one step they are working on. By nature, universities opt for breakthroughs in distinct areas. That is good as long as these breakthroughs bring us closer to the final objective, which is a completely new, biobased production process. That requires a coherent programme, steered by the MT. We must define clear priorities and direct the research.” If all goes well, by 2015 the proof of concept studies will be completed. Another five to ten years later the new production processes could be applied industrially.
“As programme management team we must encourage universities to see the bigger picture apart from the one step they are working on. By nature, universities opt for breakthroughs in distinct areas. That is good as long as these breakthroughs bring us closer to the final objective, which is a completely new, biobased production process. That requires a coherent programme, steered by the MT. We must define clear priorities and direct the research.” If all goes well, by 2015 the proof of concept studies will be completed. Another five to ten years later the new production processes could be applied industrially.
Synergy
SABIC supports the CatchBio approach, says Groothuis. “We of course also collaborate with individual universities in specific sustainability research, but CatchBio offers the synergy advantage: various universities and companies join forces and accelerate the process, enabling more cost effective and larger scale research. We also learn quickly what will work best and what to stay away from, where our life cycle assessment criteria is one of the elements. Sustainable, non food competitive solutions are after all one of the key solutions for the long term future.”