By Sun Nan, China National Chemical Information Center

Impetuses to bio-based chemicals

Bio-based chemicals – relying on biotechnologies and helping energy chemical firms produce green products – have strategic significance in a period when the whole world is striving for carbon neutrality. In spite of relatively low maturity, bio-based chemical industry shows great vitality, spurred mainly by two kinds of policies – the biggest driving force policies related to carbon neutrality and policies to promote biological economy.

1. China’s policies pertaining to carbon neutrality

As well as aiming to halt the rise of carbon emissions by 2030, China would strive for carbon neutrality by 2060, China’s president Xi Jinping said in a speech in September 2020 at the General Debate of the 75th Session of the UN General Assembly. To reach these targets, which have been listed in China’s 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-2025) and Vision 2035, bio-based chemicals are very helpful, given their superiority in reducing carbon emissions, recycling carbon dioxide and making chemical industry chain more eco-friendly and sustainable.

2. China’s policies to promote biological economy

In 2012, China issued Development Plan for Bio-industry, calling for propelling application of biomass material biological polymerization and chemical polymerization technologies, constructing industrialization demonstration projects regarding bioplastics and biochemical fibers (e.g. PLA, PBS, PHA, new biomass fibers, etc.), stimulating use of bio-based materials, etc. Four years later, China set goals that production value of bio-manufacturing industry would exceed RMB1 trillion and bio-based chemicals would account for 25% of domestic chemical production, as detailed in Development Plan for Bio-industry (2016 -2020).

In May 2022, the National Development and Reform Commission issued Development Plan for Biological Economy (2021-2025) – domestic first five-year plan made for the biological economy and detailing main tasks to: 1) strengthen innovation base and improve innovation capability; 2) stimulate pillar sectors, propel diversified development of the biological economy and make more effort to protect biological resources; 3) enhance capability to prevent risks and deal with emergencies, e.g. biosafety incidents.

Encouraged by national policies, local governments in many places made plans to heat up the biological economy, like Development Plan for Biological Economy of Heilongjiang (2021-2025) setting forth 10 actions, Development Plan for Bio-industry of Hubei (2021-2025) trying to improve the province’s total scale of core biological sectors (e.g. bio-pharmaceutical, bio-agriculture, biomedical engineering, etc.) to over RMB650 billion by 2025.

A big contribution of the biological economy is to apply biological manufacturing technologies to the petrochemical industry, with benefits mainly including speeding up green development; reducing consumption of energy resources and materials; lowering waste discharge and environment pollution; cutting production costs; improving competitiveness.

The biological manufacturing technologies are likely to change the chemical industry in two aspects, chemical raw materials and chemical process. More specifically, raw materials of bio-manufacturing are diversified, including saccharides, grease, non-food biomass, organic wastes, industrial waste gas, carbon dioxide, etc. As for chemical process, conversion and production of complex chemicals could be realized by means of microorganisms, effectively reducing emissions of greenhouse gases.

3. Necessity of improving policy system related to bio-based chemicals

Compared with some countries, China lags behind in issuing mature policies to support the bio-based chemical industry, although the bio-based chemicals have been listed in the nation’s 13th and 14th Five-Year Plans. However, domestic policies to ban production and use of some non-degradable plastic products greatly spur bio-based biodegradable plastic products. Further, polylactic acid and bio-based fuels both benefit from policies. The whole bio-based chemical industry will have more opportunities arising from carbon related policies.

Current situation of China’s bio-based chemical industry

At the primary stage of development, China’s bio-based chemical industry has huge potential in expanding market scale and improving technologies. Seen from the industrial chain, upstream biomass industry develops soundly, especially grain industry. But grain, an absolute foundation of China, could not be used as industrial raw materials in large quantity, limiting development of the bio-based chemical industry to some extent. Hence emergence of second and third generation biological manufacturing technologies, capable of utilizing agricultural wastes as raw materials.

At present, a key link is converting biomass to chemicals, production cost of which is closely related to biomass utilization efficiency, ways to collect non-food biomass raw materials, etc. Biomass chemicals are expected to replace fossil-based chemicals quickly, provided that the former enjoys good quality and low production cost. Hence, biological manufacturing technologies are in urgent need of breakthroughs and commercial application. Some products like bioethanol and bio-based nylon see a progress in industrialization, but related innovation ability remains weak.

Development trends of bio-based chemicals

The world’s largest producer and consumer of chemicals, China accounted for 40% of global petroleum and chemical market in 2020, according to data from the China Petroleum and Chemical Industry Federation. In the next 10 years, bio-based chemicals replacing fossil-based products are forecast to be valued at US$250-300 billion.

     In theory, 90% of traditional petrochemicals could be made via bio-manufacturing. Propelling production of bio-based chemicals could greatly help reduce carbon emissions, recycle carbon dioxide and achieve sustainable development. Bio-based chemical enterprise should: 1) increase technical R&D input to improve product quality and reduce production cost of some products (e.g. lactic acid), make technology more mature, etc.; 2) explore new sources of raw materials (e.g. agricultural wastes and urban organic wastes), as current mature raw material source, i.e. grain, will be restricted by policies; 3) pay attention to safety and environment protection, and establish prevention mechanisms to reduce risks from wastes, strains leakage, etc.