Charging toward greener chemicals

AMES, Iowa – Jean-Philippe Tessonnier shifts his office computer to show an illustration of a greener future that, over in the upper left, features a farmer driving a combine through a cornfield.

The illustration depicts that farmer’s harvest heading to the right to be processed by a fermentation plant powered by wind turbines and solar panels. The resulting fermentation broth of water, salts, yeast or bacteria (with the aroma of a yeasty wheat beer, Tessonnier said) moves to the middle of the illustration where an electrobiorefinery zaps it with a few volts of electricity.

That electricity is the catalyst for a reaction that produces molecules that are the basis for Nylon 6,6, a commodity polymer that all of us buy and use every day. It, for example, is used in apparel, auto components, electrical connectors, toothbrushes, camping gear and medical devices.

“This combination of biology and electricity is unique to Iowa State,” said 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 said.

But that’s not going to be easy.

“The decarbonization of the chemical manufacturing industry remains a Sisyphean endeavor, such that technological progress is often thwarted by economic viability and fierce competition with conventional fossil-derived chemicals,” Tessonnier wrote in Chem Catalysis, a chemistry journal.

A new approach to chemical manufacturing

To help move that transformation along, Tessonnier is leading a four-year, $2 million project dubbed ChaRGE, Chemicals from Renewables through Green Electrochemistry.

The project is supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation and 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’s roots date back to 2012, when Tessonnier started at Iowa State as an assistant professor affiliated with the Center for Biorenewable Chemicals based on campus. In the quest to replace fossil fuel feedstocks in chemical manufacturing, Tessonnier learned, “You can’t just replace A with B, you have to rethink these chemical transformations.”

One example of rethinking the chemistry: “How can we speed up these transformations without heat?”

And the new idea: “Apply an electrical field. Use electricity. That allows us to get energy into the system at room temperature and atmospheric pressure.”

With more work, Tessonnier and colleagues learned to use a hybrid system of fermentation and electrochemistry technologies to create biobased molecules with unique properties that serve as building blocks for commercial nylons and plastics. They’re developing the process to produce additional molecules that can create “performance-advantaged polymers.”

Such results could lead to the ChaRGE team’s goal of  “a new approach to distributed chemical manufacturing that combines sustainability, performance and chemical flexibility.”

A new kind of workforce

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 said the three undergraduates and seven graduate students in his research group are learning important lessons in their lab on the second floor of Iowa State’s 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 said.

So, the students in his lab are working with biomass conversion, biological processes, reaction engineering, product development, supply chain management, manufacturing systems as well as electrochemistry.

“Working on this research has been an invaluable experience,” said Devanshi Mistry, a doctoral student from Mumbai, India, who has been a research associate in Tessonnier’s lab since 2022. “Beyond the scientific aspects, it is also advancing my professional development by fostering leadership, problem-solving and collaboration skills. By the end of my PhD, I see myself as an early career researcher, well-prepared to contribute to the field of biomanufacturing.”

A biomanufacturing workforce that’s ready to work with these new ideas in biosynthesis and electrosynthesis could spark a lot of change, according to a summary of ChaRGE: decarbonize the U.S. chemical industry, advance American leadership in chemical manufacturing and improve rural economies.

As the researchers wrote, “The outcomes of the project are transformative at multiple levels.”

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The ChaRGE team

Five Iowa State engineers are leading the ChaRGE project:

Principal Investigator

• Jean-Philippe Tessonnier, Richard C. Seagrave Professor in Chemical and Biological Engineering

Co-principal investigators

• Sarah Ryan, the C.G. “Turk” and Joyce A. Therkildsen Department Chair and Professor of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering
• Eric Cochran, the Mary Jane Skogen Hagenson and Randy L. Hagenson Professor in Chemical and Biological Engineering
• Wenzhen Li, Professor and Herbert L. Stiles Faculty Fellow in Chemical Engineering
• Luke Roling, Assistant Professor and Jack R. and Carol A. Johnson Faculty Fellow in Chemical and Biological Engineering