Calysta produces lactic acid in NatureWorks partnership ahead of schedule
The Digest has heard from California that Calysta has successfully produced lactic acid – a key building block for industrial bioplastics – from methane at lab scale for NatureWorks.
NatureWorks is one of the world’s largest makers of bioplastics – used worldwide for industrial and consumer products. Calysta uses natural gas as a feedstock to create essential building blocks for high value sustainable fuels and chemicals.
Feedstock diversification was at the heart an an announce last June that Calysta and NatureWorks entered into an exclusive, multi-year collaboration to research and develop a practical, world-scale production process for fermenting methane — a potent greenhouse gas — into lactic acid, the building block for Ingeo, lactide intermediates and polymers made from renewable materials. This was the first key milestone of the collaboration agreement, and came ahead of schedule, according to the partners.
If the collaboration results in the successful commercialization of this first-of-its-kind technology, the cost to produce Ingeo would be structurally lowered, and the wide range of Ingeo based consumer and industrial products could be produced from an even broader set of carbon-based feedstocks, complementary to what is already in use by NatureWorks.
Calysta is a spinout of DNA 2.0, the largest US-based provider of synthetic genes for industrial and academic use. It has been established to use natural gas, as an advantaged feedstock for liquid transportation fuels and high value chemicals that are cost-competitive, scalable and reduce environmental impact. Calysta’s proprietary biological gas-to-liquids platform uses methane as a new biological feedstock, which to date for mid-sized and small gas fields has been untapped as an energy source outside of heating and electricity generation.
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