Climate-friendly methionine from Singapore

The noise of construction machinery is ushering in the future at the production plant of Evonik’s Animal Nutrition business line on Jurong Island. Here in the southwestern district of the city-state of Singapore, excavators are leveling the earth’s surface at a site on the outskirts of the plant. Plans call for a steam turbine to be installed here in the near future. At another site, stakes mark the place where a new plant building will stand in a few months’ time. And a patch of lawn will soon give way to an electrolysis unit that is expected to produce green hydrogen starting next year. The aim is to make the production of methionine, an important amino acid for animal feed, more climate-friendly.

“We’re using an upcoming expansion of our methionine production plant’s capacity to optimize the entire process at our Singapore location—and paying particular attention to our energy and raw material efficiency,” says Dr. Jan-Olaf Barth, who heads the Essential Nutrition product line at Animal Nutrition. In the future, power from renewable sources is to be used preferentially in these processes instead of fossil fuels. According to Barth, that makes Evonik a pioneer in this Southeast Asian country. “We will be one of the first major companies in Singapore to utilize green hydrogen,” he says. To date the company has mainly used “gray” hydrogen, which is extracted from natural gas, coal or petroleum.

In order to make production on Jurong Island more environmentally friendly, Evonik is cooperating with the German-American industrial gas company Linde, which is building the electrolysis unit. “We decided in favor of a technology that is especially fit for the future and will bring us cost advantages in the long run, ”says the project director, Dr. Christof Grüner, who is in charge of making sure the technology Evonik uses on Jurong Island is state-of-the-art. Evonik uses green hydrogen to produce methyl mercaptan, a DL-methionine precursor product.

Within an international project team, Dr. Henning Kaem­merer and his colleagues Poh Leng Teh and Foo Chay Chong are responsible for the implementation of the various construction plans. The three process experts are facing some tough challenges. “Not only the electrolysis unit but also all the other subprojects must be so far advanced by next winter that we can integrate them into the process during a maintenance shutdown of our methionine production,” says Kaemmerer. To make sure this happens, they need to coordinate very closely with the site manager, Kevin Kennedy. Evonik has high hopes for the modification of its methionine production. The additional 40,000 tons of MetAMINO® per year should then be produced with a specific CO₂ footprint that is only half as big as it was previously. In terms of the total volume of 340,000 tons of MetAMINO® from two plants, this means a six-percent decrease in emissions.

The project in Singapore is part of the green transformation known as Next Generation Evonik, which the company initiated in 2022. Its two key aims are to make production at the locations more climate-friendly and to increase sales by means of sustainable innovations. ­MetAMINO®, the DL-methionine from Evonik, has already been playing an important role in sustainable agriculture for decades. Farm animals take in methionine with their feed. If this essential amino acid is missing, other components of the animals’ feed cannot be optimally metabolized. The plant-based components of the feed often contain insufficient amounts of methionine by comparison with other amino acids. As a result, the animals excrete all of the feed components they were unable to metabolize. This is neither environmentally friendly nor cost-efficient.

Adding a small amount of methionine to animal feed can significantly reduce the amounts of other raw material feed components that are needed. This reduces the amount of agricultural land needed for cultivating soybeans or legumes and decreases the nitrogen emissions due to animal farming. It thus has a positive effect on sustainability, as is shown by several certified life cycle assessments. “If we want to provide a growing world population with high-quality animal protein under conditions of limited natural resources, we need to operate as efficiently as possible,” says Barth. Evonik’s Animal Nutrition business line is part of its life sciences division, Nutrition & Care. It is completely oriented toward improving the lives of human beings and animals—by means of solutions that also offer advantages in terms of sustainability.