Symposium Told Bio-Chemicals Has a 'Robust' Future

The arrival of bio-based succinic acid in the marketplace is creating new markets for the building-block chemical BioAmber manufactures in Sarnia.

BioAmber vice-president Anne Waddell spoke about the potential for bio-succinic acid, a chemical the Montreal-based company makes from corn syrup, during a presentation Wednesday at the Sarnia-Lambton Bio-Industrial Symposium.

The company formed less than a decade ago and began making bio-succinic acid, a chemical traditionally made from oil, at a pilot plant in France, using technology that originated in the 1990s with the U.S. Department of Energy.

In 2015, BioAmber opened a $141-million plant in Sarnia and is considering building a second larger $500-million production site in Sarnia or Louisiana.

“We are on a mission to de-couple the chemical industry from petroleum, and we're making strides in that direction,” Waddell said during her presentation to more than 120 people attending the symposium organized by Lambton College, Bioindustrial Innovation Canada and the Sarnia-Lambton Economic Partnership at the Best Western Guildwood Inn.

Waddell said the company's long-term goal is to begin using farm and forest residual material as its raw material.

“We have a carbon-neutral carbon footprint as it stands and we use a lot less energy to make bio-based succinic acid than the petroleum industry uses,” she said.

“But, our environmental footprint, and hopefully our costs, could be substantially improved.”

BioAmber has already signed on as an investor and customer for a plant Comet Biorefining plans to build in Sarnia to turn corn and wheat stalks into dextrose sugar for industrial uses.

Comet chairperson Andrew Richard said the company is working on detailed designs for the plant to be built on the TransAlta site in Sarnia.

“We still see still commissioning this facility and being operational,” in 2019, Richard said.

The company that formed down the highway in London is in the process of moving its offices to Sarnia, he said.

“We're excited to be here.”

Waddell told the symposium bio-chemicals have a more “robust” future than petrochemicals.

“The chemistry that is going to come from bio-technology is going to allow us to design molecules that can perform specific functions,” she said.

“It is going to allow us to genetically modify organisms to produce new kinds of materials.”

That goes beyond just replacing a petrochemical with a bio-chemical.

“We are talking about entering new realms where one can use technology to produce brand new materials that function in better and different ways,” she said.

“We are on the cusp of that.”

But, Waddell said there remain challenges for new technologies moving into the marketplace, including showing their products meet customers requirements.

So far, BioAmber has qualified its bio-succinic acid with 200 potential customers and has begun selling it to approximately 50 of them, she said.

Succinic acid can be used to make products ranging from plastics, paints, adhesives, artificial leather, food additives, cosmetics and pharmaceuticals.

Waddell said BioAmber is also discovering bio-succinic acid can provide better results when used to make some of those products.

The chemical wasn't widely used in the past because it was expensive to produce from oil, said Sandy Marshall, a chemical industry veteran who is executive director of Bioindustrial Innovation Canada.

That changed now that large quantities of bio-succinic acid are being made by a number of producers, he said.

“Succinic acid is now going into applications that succinic acid never went before,” Marshall said.