Jean-Philippe Tessonnier shifts his computer to show an illustration of a greener future.
In the upper left corner, a farmer drives a combine through a cornfield. That farmer’s harvest heads to the right to be processed by a fermentation plant powered by wind turbines and solar panels. The resulting fermentation broth of water and salts with yeast or bacteria (imagine the aroma of a yeasty wheat beer) moves to the middle of the illustration where an electrobiorefinery zaps it with a little electricity.
That electricity is the catalyst for a reaction that produces molecules –– molecules that are the basis of nylons and plastics we use daily in products.
“This combination of biology and electricity is unique to Iowa State,” says Tessonnier, the Richard C. Seagrave Professor in Chemical and Biological Engineering. “I don’t know anybody else in the U.S. who’s doing this.”
Combining bio-based reactions with electricity-driven reactions could be a step toward transforming chemical manufacturing to a greener industry that’s less dependent on petroleum-based materials and the need to process them with high energies, temperatures, and emissions, Tessonnier says.
But it’s not going to be easy.
“The decarbonization of the chemical manufacturing industry remains a Sisyphean endeavor,” writes Tessonnier in Chem Catalysis, a chemistry journal. “Technological progress is often thwarted by economic viability and fierce competition with conventional fossil-derived chemicals.”
To help move that transformation along, Tessonnier is leading a four-year, $2 million project dubbed ChaRGE (Chemicals from Renewables through Green Electro-chemistry).
The project, supported by the National Science Foundation, is all about demonstrating that a combination of bio-and electro-technologies can efficiently and cleanly produce molecules that are valuable to industry.
The project also goes a long way toward educating a biomanufacturing workforce for Iowa and beyond. While Iowa State offers a class in electrochemical engineering, Tessonnier says the three undergraduates and seven graduate students in his research group are also learning important lessons in the Biorenewables Research Laboratory.
“At the end of the day, this workforce will need to be as broad as possible in terms of education and experience,” Tessonnier says.
So, the students in his lab are working with biomass conversion, biological process, reaction engineering, product development, supply chain management, manufacturing systems as well as electrochemistry.
That kind of workforce, one that integrates these new ideas in biosynthesis and electrosynthesis, could do all kinds of things: decarbonize the U.S. chemical industry, advance American leadership in chemical manufacturing, and improve rural economies.
As Tessonnier writes in a summary of ChaRGE, “The outcomes of the project are transformative at multiple levels.”