Toward Climate Neutrality

The new head of process development in Blair, Nebraska, had an ambitious goal. “We can boost the plant’s productivity by 50 percent,” said Dr. Henning Kaemmerer in the fall of 2018, shortly after he had moved to the USA from Hanau. The plant, which had been producing the amino acid BIOLYS® for almost two decades, had been repeatedly optimized after its initial commissioning. But…50 percent? A productivity boost of this magnitude was hard to imagine.

BIOLYS® is added to animal feed—primarily feed for pigs. The animals need L-lysine, an important component of proteins. However, like human beings, they cannot produce this amino acid on their own, so they have to take it in with their feed. The amounts of the amino acid L-lysine in the plant-based components of pig feed are very low. If BIOLYS® is added to the feed as a source of lysine, the volume of the feed can be significantly reduced. That relieves the animals’ metabolic processes, conserves natural resources, and reduces feed costs and emissions.

BIOLYS® is produced by means of fermentation. In gigantic stainless steel boilers, each with a volume of several hundred cubic meters, bacteria convert dextrose, a sugar, into L-lysine—much more of it than they need for themselves. The BIOLYS® process at Evonik uses a strain of Corynebacterium. The process engineers provide the ideal conditions for its growth and production processes: an aqueous medium, the right temperature, a plentiful supply of oxygen, and some mineral substances. After several days in the fermenter, the organisms are inactivated and the fermentation broth is drawn off and then vaporized. The mixture of lysine and bacterial biomass is the basis of the product, which is subsequently processed into a granular form that is easy to handle as animal feed. 

Kaemmerer feels that his approach has been validated. “This shows what is possible when experts from the areas of research, process development, and production cooperate closely and pool their decades of experience regarding the microorganisms and the processes,” he says. That’s because the bacterial strain and the process must be repeatedly adapted to each other. The only unchanging element is the plant itself. As Kaemmerer explains, “The plant defines the limits within which we work.” This has enabled the product quantity per fermenter to be more than tripled since 2000. Simultaneously, the amino acid content of the initial product has increased significantly from BIOLYS®55 to BIOLYS®77.

Other Evonik locations are making good use of the experiences of their colleagues in the USA. “Of course we’ve benefited from the know-how in Blair,” says Miguel Menezes, who is responsible for BIOLYS® production in Castro, Brazil. The plant in Castro was commissioned in 2015. 

Three quarters of the total production is sold in regional markets. That also reduces transportation routes and improves the carbon footprint. A recently conducted life cycle assessment confirms that only 0.1 kilogram of CO₂ equivalent is generated per kilogram of BIOLYS®77. Miguel Menezes is proud of this achievement, and Henning Kaemmerer is equally proud of his productivity increase. “We’re very close to achieving a completely climate-neutral production process,” he says. “In that case, the plant in Castro would be Evonik’s first industrial-scale production plant with a neutral carbon footprint.”