9-01: Integrating biological and chemicals catalysts for biobased chemical production

The replacement of crude oil-derived chemicals with biobased chemicals is both a technical and economic challenge.  From a technical perspective the challenge is how to selectively remove oxygen from a highly oxygenated substrate.  However, the economic challenge is even more significant in that the biobased chemicals must compete against a highly efficient petrochemical production system.  The serial approach of targeting one biobased chemical product at a time, which is the most common technical approach, is both time intensive and expensive.  To mitigate costs, a need exists to develop a technological framework in which a range of biobased chemicals can be produced from a common platform.  One such generalized platform being developed by the NSF Engineering Research Center for Biorenewable Chemicals (CBiRC), depends on the exploitation of the fatty acid/polyketide metabolic pathway leading to a diversity of intermediate chemicals that are subsequently converted to chemical products using chemical catalysts.  An overview of the technical strategy being used by CBiRC to achieve a generalized chemical production platform will be discussed using several specific examples involving varying chain length carboxylic acids that are converted to alpha-olefins/fatty alcohols and biological-produced pyrones with subsequent ring opening or aromatization.  The pyrone system will be discussed in greater technical depth to demonstrate the power of biological and chemical catalyst researchers interacting.