Elevance Renewable Sciences announced its intent to go public by filing an S-1 with the SEC last month. In the process, they hope to raise $100 million to fund continued R&D, capital expansion, and product development. Founded in 2007, Elevance developed from a partnership between Cargill and Materia to couple Cargill’s expertise in agricultural oils and Materia’s expertise in olefin metathesis. The company makes green alternatives to traditional petroleum products made by the olefin metathesis of natural oils and is planning construction of three integrated “biorefineries” with a projected ultimate capacity of 2.2 billion lbs/yr of green chemicals and fuels.
This ambitious application of olefin metathesis definitely deserved a post on All Things Metathesis, but as I looked around, I realized that Jim Lane of Biofuels Digest already did a great job of summarizing the company here. He boils down Elevance’s 200+ page S-1 filing into a short and enjoyable read.
Elevance’s success is a testament to the scalability of metathesis in cost competitive commercial applications, and if things work out as they hope, their IPO will mark a significant advance in the use of renewable feedstocks as petroleum alternatives.
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Ru metathesis-based reforming of vegetable oils can be viable if the price of edible oils and ruthenium stay within reasonable limits, or if the increases are smaller than the increases of crude oil. But the Ru prices are extremely vulnerable to speculation (see the incredible Ru price spike in 2007-8). And food-grade feedstocks are getting steadily more expensive too: for example the manufacture of recyclable plastic made from starch has been badly hit by the corn prices that more than doubled recently.
Great point that market dynamics are always at play in commercial activity. Having a robust and efficient catalyst technology such as metathesis which consumes very little metal and offers broad feedstock sourcing is certainly a plus.
Thanks to Richard P. for pointing out a mistake in the post. Elevance plans to have three plants up and running by the end of 2014 with a capacity of 2.2 billion lbs/yr. I had shorted them a billion pounds! The mistake is corrected as of today.