The Extraordinary Re-Making of Ordinary Things: Part 1 Reinventing Ethanol as Ethyl Acetate

In Texas and Nebraska, there have been a flurry of press releases from Viridis Chemical and its partners – most recently, today news arrives that Viridis Chemical inked a price, performance-guaranteed agreement with Koch Project Solutions to design and construct capital improvements to increase production capacity at its renewable chemicals plant in Columbus, Nebraska. Upon completion, Viridis Chemical’s Columbus plant will be producing both USP grade bio-based ethanol and bio-based Ethyl Acetate, the partners said.

? You might be wondering if there’s a connection between Viridis and the long-simmering Prairie Catalytic project in Columbus, where sputtering operations ground to a halt in early 2020, after a multi-year effort to build a first-of-kind commercial plant that opened in September 2018, had an elongated commissioning period into 2019, and was laying off employees by fall 2019.

, anyway?

Ethyl acetate, it’s that sweet-smelling ester found in nail polish and glue. There, think adhesives, paints, coatings, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, printing inks, packaging and industrial solvents. Not to mention decaffeinating tea or coffee.

The timeline to next steps

Viridis Chemical’s Columbus plant is currently undergoing capital improvements that will increase production capacity. The plant is expected to begin production of high-quality USP grade bio-Ethanol in mid-2021 and production of at a global  scale in Q4 2022.

All that lovely hydrogen

The world is short on peace, love, and hydrogen. And there’s a secret byproduct here in the Prairie Catalytic IP, your friend the single-atom wonder gas, Star of the Hydrogen Economy, Friend of the Fuel Cell, Amore of Ammonia, Nemesis of the Hindenburg, something that’s in large supply inside the sun but in short supply here on Earth: hydrogen. We can think of a dozen processes that could use a paid-for source of renewable H2, and so one kind of wonders if there will be, sometime, another small commercial or demonstration-scale facility, one day, to use all those tasty renewable hydrogen atoms.

The Prairie Catalytic backstory

Bottom line, ethanol prices are in the dumps, and US ethanol production exceeds demand as a gasoline additive. So, is there some Extraordinary Re-Making of Ordinary Things going on here for good reason.

As we reported in November 2017, that Prairie Catalytic, a subsidiary of Greenyug, closed on the sale of project bonds to finance its first commercial production facility to develop a 50,000 metric tons per year urethane grade Ethyl Acetate production facility that is located adjacent to the Archer-Daniels-Midland Company ethanol production facility in the City of Columbus, Platte County, Nebraska.

As new as the process is, as new as Prairie Catalytic is — the most novel aspect of this story is the financing, which has been tough and involved a spectacular amount of creative structuring to get done.