Wood instead of pet­ro­leum: New approach to pro­du­cing chem­ic­al sub­stances from renew­able resources

Pet­ro­leum might well be replaced by wood soon when it comes to man­u­fac­tur­ing chem­ic­al sub­stances. Research has now made sig­ni­fic­ant pro­gress towards using sus­tain­able bio­mass, like wood, as an altern­at­ive raw mater­i­al for chem­ic­al pro­duc­tion. Sci­ent­ists at Johannes Guten­berg Uni­ver­sity Mainz (JGU) in Ger­many and at the Uni­ver­sity of Alabama in Tus­ca­loosa in the USA recently man­aged to syn­thes­ize two com­plex chem­ic­al sub­stances from wood-based start­ing mater­i­als. The pro­cess can be as cost-effect­ive as the con­ven­tion­al pet­ro­leum product-based pro­cess and is less dam­aging to the envir­on­ment. ​“Our aim is to man­u­fac­ture every­day products from renew­able resources without an impact on the envir­on­ment while at the same time ensur­ing that the pro­cess is eco­nom­ic­ally com­pet­it­ive,” explained Pro­fess­or Till Opatz of Mainz Uni­ver­sity. The res­ults of their research have been pub­lished in the prom­in­ent journ­al Ange­wandte Chemie. The Ger­man research team led by Pro­fess­or Till Opatz at JGU’s Insti­tute of Organ­ic Chem­istry par­ti­cip­ates in the inter­dis­cip­lin­ary research con­sor­ti­um Chem­ic­al Bio­Medi­cine (Chem­Bio­Med) fun­ded by the Carl Zeiss Found­a­tion and works on the syn­thes­is of sub­stances that can inhib­it tumor cell growth. The US research group under Pro­fess­or Anthony J. Ardu­engo III is par­tic­u­larly inter­ested in devel­op­ing indus­tri­ally applic­able meth­ods for using mater­i­als derived from wood bio­mass for the sus­tain­able man­u­fac­ture of a broad array of basic chem­ic­als such as, for example, sub­stances used to pro­duce auto­mot­ive coat­ings, plastics, adhes­ives, and oth­er com­mod­ity mater­i­als. At a con­fer­ence in Gos­lar in Ger­many about two years ago, the two research­ers real­ized that their exper­i­ence and expert­ise com­ple­men­ted each oth­er per­fectly for address­ing issues sur­round­ing sus­tain­ab­il­ity of a mod­ern chem­ic­al industry. Since then, a vig­or­ous exchange of research­ers and stu­dents between Mainz and Tus­ca­loosa has fueled the col­lab­or­a­tion. The two teams have now been able to demon­strate wood-based, or xylo­chem­ic­al, syn­theses of sub­stances for which pet­ro­leum products are usu­ally employed as start­ing mater­i­als. This new work shows that the rel­ev­ant car­bon skel­et­ons can be cre­ated solely from wood-based start­ing mater­i­als. In the case of one tar­get com­pound, the nat­ur­al product ili­ci­fo­line B, no com­par­is­on with a pet­ro­chem­ic­al route was pos­sible as this sub­stance had nev­er before been syn­thes­ized in a labor­at­ory. But when it came to deriv­at­ives of the nat­ur­al paink­iller morphine, the new xylo­chem­ic­al syn­thes­is turned out to be sig­ni­fic­antly more effi­cient than any pre­vi­ously known route based on pet­ro­chem­istry. ​“This shows that the imple­ment­a­tion of a wood-based chem­ic­al eco­nomy is not neces­sar­ily asso­ci­ated with decreased cost-effi­ciency,” added Daniel Stubba, JGU first author of the pub­lic­a­tion. ​“Xylo­chem­istry could rep­res­ent an import­ant altern­at­ive to the cli­mate-dam­aging use of the earth’s finite resources of nat­ur­al oil and gas in the pro­duc­tion of chem­ic­als.” Fur­ther related research is ongo­ing in the two labor­at­or­ies and addi­tion­al inter­na­tion­al col­lab­or­at­ors have been recruited to address a broad­er range of con­nec­ted top­ics. For this lat­ter pur­pose, an inter­na­tion­al research con­sor­ti­um called StanCE (Sus­tain­able Tech­no­logy for a new Chem­ic­al Eco­nomy) has been estab­lished. It brings togeth­er research­ers from the USA, Ger­many, Japan, and Canada who are col­lab­or­at­ing on the devel­op­ment of an altern­at­ive, sus­tain­able chem­ic­al infra­struc­ture that does not con­sume finite resources and avoids eco­lo­gic­al imbal­ances while remain­ing cost-effi­cient. Wood con­tains a vari­ety of poten­tial start­ing mater­i­als that, because of their chem­ic­al struc­ture, are bet­ter suited than pet­ro­leum products for many applic­a­tions. It is often neces­sary to sub­ject the lat­ter to extens­ive trans­form­a­tion pro­cesses before they acquire com­par­able func­tion­al­ity. ​“Wood is the ideal raw mater­i­al because it is renew­able and an eas­ily access­ible resource at the same time. Its com­pos­i­tion is like a box of var­ied build­ing blocks from which products for today’s mod­ern world can be man­u­fac­tured,” said Opatz, adding that Alabama and Ger­many, like Canada, have extens­ive avail­able wood resources.

Publication

Daniel Stubba et al., Xylo­chemie – Naturstoff­syn­these aus Holz, Ange­wandte Chemie, 21. Okto­ber 2015, DOI: 10.1002/ange.201509446 Source: idw