A major breakthrough has been made at the Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) based in Colorado, USA that could remove the chemical industry’s need for petroleum in many processes.
As reported in the journal ‘Nature Plants’ the discovery could lead to many chemicals that today are derived from petroleum being manufactured from biomass. It may also provide a way for producing all of our energy needs from plant matter. The report explains that, “NREL scientists engineered a cyanobacterium, Synechocystis, that is unable to store carbon as glycogen into a strain that could metabolize xylose (a main sugar component of cellulosic biomass), thus turning xylose and carbon dioxide into pyruvate and 2-oxoglutarate, organic chemicals that can be used to produce a variety of bio-based chemicals and biofuels. While testing this mutant strain under multiple growth conditions, the scientists discovered, unexpectedly, that it excreted large amounts of acetic acid.
Acetic acid is a chemical produced in high volumes for a wide variety of purposes. The chemical industry produces more than 12 million tons per year of acetic acid, primarily from methanol, which in turn is mainly produced from natural gas. The potential to produce acetic acid from photosynthesis could reduce the nation’s reliance on natural gas.“
The discovery itself involved a little luck and a lot of detective work to calculate the previously unknown role that an enzyme called phosphoketolase (as illustrated in the picture above) plays in breaking down natural sugars found in organic matter.
As NREL senior scientist Jianping Yu explained, “It turns out that the phosphoketolase pathway is a major pathway because it avoids the carbon loss associated with traditional pathways. [As a result] a wide variety of bioproducts and biofuels can be made more efficiently using this pathway. As it is more efficient than the traditional pathways, it can be exploited to increase photosynthetic productivity“
Whilst this may result in better biofuel use and reduce mankind’s dependency on fossil fuels for energy, it could also lead to further discoveries on how plant matter can act as a feedstock for what are currently petrochemicals. As the laboratory claims, the discovery “opens the door to better ways of producing chemicals from carbon dioxide or plant biomass, rather than deriving them from petroleum.“
Whilst this is the first step in a long journey, some scientists are beginning to ask, “Is this the end of the petrochemicals industry?”