By Dan Lemke
Ground has broken on a unique biomanufacturing facility in Marshall, Minnesota that will turn corn into chemicals.
Bioforge Marshall will use a novel chemoenzymatic technology to sustainably manufacture biobased chemicals for use in concrete, cleaning, agricultural, and energy industries. The 500,000-square-foot biomanufacturing facility, developed by Houston-based Solugen, is being constructed on a 34-acre parcel adjacent to an ADM corn processing facility. The facility will utilize dextrose from the ADM plant to manufacture low-carbon organic acids for a wide range of applications.
Solugen Chief Technology Officer Sean Hunt, a chemical engineer, says he and co-founder Gaurab Chakrabarti developed the process on a small scale nearly 10 years ago. While in medical school, Chakrabarti, a pancreatic cancer physician, found an enzyme that was very efficient at producing chemicals.
“We wondered what it would look like if you took the best elements of fermentation, which would be these engineered enzymes, and the best elements of petrochemistry, which are the heterogeneous metal catalysts, and you combined the two,” Hunt recalls. “That’s really what our process is. We’re a hybrid approach to making chemicals. It’s the best of both worlds, and it’s a new outlet for agricultural feedstocks. We’ve pitched it very simply—it’s corn to chemicals.”
Hunt says the pair built a small reactor out of parts from a home improvement store. They would operate the reactor at night and on weekends making water treatment chemicals from corn sugar.
“Then we took our water treatment chemicals that we had made from corn sugar, and we drove around the Dallas area, and we poured the chemicals in people’s hot tubs to treat their water,” Hunt explains.
Solugen built a bigger pilot unit about five years ago and then constructed its first commercial Bioforge facility, in Houston, Texas. That facility produces 10,000 tons of chemicals per year. Bioforge Marshall will be ten times larger than the Houston plant and is expected to utilize 150 million pounds of dextrose from the ADM corn processing facility each year.
Efficiency Benefits
Hunt says part of the beauty of the Solugen process is its efficiency. He says Solugen is able to get 94% yield, while traditional petrochemistry is closer to a 60% yield. Fermentation, like what occurs in an ethanol plant, is typically about a 40% yield.
“If you can have an over 90% integrated yield from your corn feedstock to the product you’re trying to make, that’s really game-changing,” Hunt notes. “This process creates a whole new outlet for corn that can be really massive and exceptionally valuable.”
Hunt says Solugen is commercializing a range of organic acids. Customers use the chemicals for water treatment in facilities like ethanol mills, soybean crush plants, schools, hospitals, and municipal water treatment. In agriculture, Hunt says Solugen also produces complexing agents that enable higher nutrition absorption that leads to higher crop yield potential.
“It’s essentially a bio-stimulant for agriculture,” Hunt explains.
The same chemical can also be used in concrete for flowability in lieu of petrochemicals. Government agencies like the Department of Defense are also interested in it as a corrosion inhibitor.
“It’s one chemical, but with all these different, diverse applications that you can build product portfolios into,” Hunt says. “That makes it pretty exciting, and it’s all going to come from Marshall area grown corn, which is the really cool part.”
The Bioforge Marshall footprint will be much smaller than most petrochemical refineries. Hunt says most traditional refineries create an alphabet soup of byproducts and then spend considerable time, equipment, and energy separating the individual molecules for different uses or to dispose of as waste. With Solugen’s process, there’s less capital expenditure and energy needed.
“You can just make the molecule that you want,” Hunt notes. “That’s what green chemistry and green manufacturing is. How do you increase the yield as much as possible while minimizing impacts to the environment.”
Not only is the Solugen process more efficient than fermentation but it’s also estimated to reduce 18 million kilograms of carbon dioxide per year compared to traditional petrochemicals and fermentation-based processes.
“As the demand for sustainable products continues to rise, we look forward to partnering with our customers in their decarbonization efforts,” Chakrabarti says.
Innovation Recognized
Hunt participated in the ‘Scaling Up for the Future’ panel at this year’s New Uses Forum, which was hosted by the Agricultural Utilization Research Institute (AURI) and focused on bioindustrial processing.
“This is a key industry sector that we believe has potential in Minnesota to drive many new markets for our agricultural feedstocks,” says Shannon Schecht, AURI executive director. “The focus also coincides with the recent Department of Defense investments in biomanufacturing through BioMADE which has a presence in Minnesota.”
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office announced a conditional commitment to Solugen Bioforge Marshall for a $213.6 million loan guarantee to finance the construction of the facility. This commitment is the single largest U.S. government investment in bioindustrial manufacturing since President Joe Biden signed an executive order on Advancing Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing Innovation for a Sustainable, Safe, and Secure American Bioeconomy.
Hunt says Solugen also has formed a partnership with Sasol Chemicals, one of the largest chemical companies in the world, to commercialize products in the cleaning space like chelating agents used in formulations for laundry detergent and industrial cleaning.
Gaining Momentum
Hunt says the path Solugen is currently on is just the beginning. He expects more innovation to occur.
“This is just the beginning,” Hunt states. “Each time we work with one of our customers on incorporating this chemistry, our customers then go and find all sorts of other applications that they want to incorporate our chemistry into. So, they really take us on some exciting journeys.”
“Solugen is at the forefront of the next wave of biological processing to create high-value biomolecules and chemicals using agricultural feedstocks. This is a step beyond ethanol fermentation using biological processes,” Schlecht says.
Schlecht says bioprocessing advancements like the one Solugen has developed, are among the next opportunity waves for agriculture.
“The reduction in research and development costs for bioindustrial manufacturing is very exciting and creates many new opportunities for biobased products made from agricultural feedstocks. It is exciting to see Solugen choose Marshall as the site of their Bioforge efforts to create organic acids to replace petroleum-based materials.”
The groundbreaking for Bioforge Marshall was in April 2024 and Hunt expects the facility to be operational by the end of 2025.
