Chemicals

It is estimated that up to $250 billion of the $1 trillion global commodity, specialty, and fine chemical markets are either readily or potentially addressable by bioproduction processes.

Bioproduction of chemicals is a rapidly growing area largely owing to the fact that biological systems are extremely adept at manipulating a relatively small number of safe and common building block materials such as water, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, sulfates, and phosphates, and transforming them into a multitude of complex compounds. From both economic and environmental perspectives, bioproduction is far preferable to many non-biological synthesis methods in which the starting materials are necessarily complex intermediate compounds that raise toxicity, health, safety and cost issues.

Every major chemical company in the world is pursuing increased bioproduction of high-value molecules and every covalent bond in a high value molecule requires energy for formation. This presents an enormous opportunity to form strategic partnerships for the development of energy efficient, bioproduction strains targeted to a wide variety of chemical compounds.