Light olefins (ethylene, propylene, linear butylene, isobutylene, butadiene..) are currently obtained from fossil oil. They are the principal building blocks of the chemical industry, representing each an existing multi-billion dollar market. Light olefins are not produced by microorganisms and no direct bioprocess to produce these molecules industrially from natural resources has been developed so far.
Global Bioenergies (listed on the Alternext stockmarket) has been founded in 2008 to develop new metabolic pathways for the direct biological production of light olefins from renewable resources. “Direct” refers to the fact that the product secreted by the micro-organism is the light olefin itself, and not an alcohol such as ethanol or isobutanol or butanediol which are water-soluble and hence soluble in the production medium.
A first major success has been obtained on bio-production of isobutene, one of the most important petrochemical building blocks that can be converted into fuels, plastics, organic glass and elastomers. The company is now concentrating its efforts on the industrialization of the isobutene process which consists in increasing yields and scaling up of the process. In addition, the approach that resulted in the successful engineering of a biological route to produce isobutene is also currently being applied to the design of innovative bioproduction processes for several other key molecules of the petrochemical industry.