Lube-Tech PUBLISHED BY LUBE: THE EUROPEAN LUBRICANTS INDUSTRY MAGAZINE
Jonathan A. Brekan and Gregory E. Gerhardt, Elevance Renewable Sciences, Woodridge, Illinois U.S.A.
1. Introduction
Elevance Renewable Sciences, Inc. announced the start up and shipment of commercial products in 2013 from a jointly owned world-scale biorefinery with Wilmar International Limited located in Gresik, Indonesia. The biorefinery was constructed based on proprietary Nobel Prize-winning olefin metathesis1 technology capable of converting renewable natural oils (e.g., palm, soybean, canola, mustard, algal, etc.) into high-value specialty difunctional molecules, olefins and oleochemicals with a capacity of 180 kMT.2
There are large established
markets for oleochemicals and olefins in place to provide off take, however, it is the advantaged specialty chemicals that create technology options and value for Elevance partners. This paper reviews the development and design of a new, synthetic base stock obtained through a polymerisation reaction of difunctional ester building blocks. These novel materials enable Elevance to effectively address the lubricants and additives market by addressing both bio-content and, more importantly, differentiated performance.
2. Drivers There are three drivers steering the lubricant industry today.3 1) Regulations continue to tighten, with higher requirements on fuel economy and emissions. 2) Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) are responding to the regulations in part by redesigning engines to deliver more power from smaller displacement engines and, as a result, increasing the performance requirement on lubricants. The fundamental driver influencing society, politicians, consumers and the lubricant industry, however, is 3) the environment. Consumers want more sustainable products and this is driving more environmental solutions across societies worldwide. The net result is that lubricants are shifting in technology, mostly towards higher quality and performance and the lubricant industry is becoming more complex with an increasingly diverse range of performance targets, portfolio of OEMs and customer locations.
34 LUBE MAGAZINE NO.132 APRIL 2016
3.1 Elevance Inherent™ Building Blocks Within Elevance, using our metathesis catalyst, we simply “unlock” the unsaturated sites in the long carbon chains present in nature’s triglycerides to create novel, difunctional and renewable building blocks and renewable olefins. Metathesis is the rearrangement of unsaturated carbon bonds (Figure 1). Historically limited to molecules without important functional groups, “Grubbs catalysts” represent a significant breakthrough – opening the chemistry to plant oil applications.
No.103 page 1
Biorefinery Technology: New, High-Performance Approaches in Lubricant Base Stocks
Figure 1. Olefin metathesis of natural oils
Inherent™ C10 methyl ester (ME) is an exciting new platform chemical (Figure 2). With its alpha olefin, carboxylic acid groups and commercially important chain length, it provides functionality for derivatization and a variety of innovation possibilities. Like acrylic acid (a product with a similar difunctional structure) we see this platform chemical and those like it that we produce at scale in our biorefinery as exciting building blocks for a wide variety of applications and industries. This new, difunctional material can be modified to achieve unique functionality via branching, oligomerisation or polymerisation, functional group insertion or exchange.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73
