seanhunt1

more than a month. Best to think of it in terms of H2O2 turnovers per enzyme. Imagine if we made a new enzyme that had 10x faster turnovers but a 5x lower lifetime. Assuming we could still keep up with its oxygen demands, that is a better enzyme despite a lower lifetime.

Thanks so much for this advice, very helpful!

Well our current facility takes up ca 2000 square feet and has sufficient capacity for our new consumer product launch, it really depends on what you want to do with the peroxide. If you want to compete on price against the current process though, it still has to be a lot bigger than our pilot facility.

haha yes, we do hear recurring revenue here. Enzymes are indeed fragile relative to metals and have limited lifetimes. However, even metals like palladium leach, sinter, get poisoned, etc. In the current process, many facilities have to continually regenerate their palladium catalysts. The beauty of working with enzymes in the here and now is that we have the tools to continuously optimize them and continuously make them cheaper. We are improving our enzyme lifetimes with each new batch, and we envision being able to release new and improved enzymes to our customers every year

At scale, our technique is economically viable on its own (but subsidies would always be nice I suppose). Currently though, we are on a pilot scale so we cannot yet compete on volume, hence our gtm strategy of differentiated hydrogen peroxide products.

No worries, I will do my best! Yes, peroxide from any source can cause explosions, but usually only at high concentrations in water. At low concentrations (below 8%) metal contaminants, especially precious metals like platinum and palladium, can cause explosions.

During manufacturing, hydrogen peroxide is synthesized at low concentrations in the anthraquinone process (below 8%). However, it is manufactured in a highly explosive alkylated aromatic solvent and in the presence of a palladium catalyst. Both hydrogen and oxygen are used, which when combined will explode quite easily. The current manufacturing process goes to great lengths to keep the hydrogen and oxygen in separate chambers, but inevitably something goes awry. What is a pretty common problem is after liquid-liquid extraction, there is some residual hydrogen peroxide left in the aromatic solvent that makes its way into the hydrogenation chamber. In this scenario, you have hydrogen gas, palladium metal, a flammable solvent...and hydrogen peroxide all in the same vessel...which is a bomb :(

Our process doesn't use metals or a flammable solvent. We replaced them with enzymes and water.

thanks so much!

Yes! Enzymatic chemical production supplanting traditional fermentation is why Solugen exists. Historically, enzymatic production is used in only 3% of all chemical production processes. However, with CRISPR/Cas9 and the second wave of biotech, enzymes are becoming cheaper to engineer and even cheaper to mass-produce. People have tried fermentation to biofuels in the past, but it didn't work. Cells are really really good at making proteins, like enzymes, but they suck at making just a single chemical product. Downstream separations become a nightmare. We think it better that fermentation should be exclusively used to make enzymes and then those enzymes should be used to do single-chemical manufacturing. Our core technology revolves around designing and providing customers with the perfect scaled reactors for their enzymatic technologies. Fermentation reactors severely limit the capabilities of enzymes, and the reactors in the petrochemical industry are also ill-suited for enzyme manufacturing. We like to call our work "enzyme-reactor" fit!

agreed! We are working on this one, thanks!

thanks, I think we need to do a better job at differentiating between hydrogen peroxide the molecule vs. the hydrogen peroxide production process. We'll update this section today so that it hopefully is more clear. Here is what I am thinking:

1.) Hydrogen peroxide the molecule is a beautiful molecule and all hydrogen peroxide molecules are the same. Hydrogen peroxide is safe and decomposes into just water and oxygen so it doesn't leave behind solid residue or pose an inhalation hazard. The differences arise in terms of purity. Today on the market, you can buy technical grade, food grade, five different semiconductor grades, and rocket grade. Bioperoxide has semiconductor grade purity. Most other hydrogen peroxide products on the market (especially in the consumer space) are made using cheap technical grade peroxide that has heavy metal and alkylated aromatic contaminants. This is what we mean by "toxin free"

2.) Hydrogen peroxide the process is what we are referring to in "the chemicals in our cleaning products, like hydrogen peroxide, are dangerous, expensive, and come with an enormous carbon footprint." Our manufacturing process is not dangerous since we are not mixing hydrogen and oxygen in an aromatic solvent, is cheaper, and our Houston facility is operating on wind energy.

Please let me know if this makes more sense, thanks!

yep, sugars have more internal energy than peroxide (you can just add up all the bond enthalpies for a quick estimate). Peroxide is used in fuels because 1.) it is much easier to activate than sugars because it is thermodynamically metastable and 2.) it is an oxidizer. Oxidizers help accelerate the release of internal energy from energy-dense fuels (e.g. kerosene...or even sugar). Another way to look at this is reduced vs oxidized. O2 is the most (stable) oxidized form of oxygen while H2O is a reduced form of oxygen. H2O2 is intermediate. Hexane is a very reduced C6 compound (high internal energy) whereas 6 CO2 molecules are the most oxidized (low internal energy). glucose is intermediate between hexane and 6 CO2 molecules but closer to hexane in terms of how reduced it is. Glucose is quite energy dense and it is for this reason that it is used by plants to store energy from sunlight.

these are some great questions! kW/kg is really the magic number but very difficult to extract precisely (we do have estimates though from energy balance calculations). A more qualitative way to look at energy cost comparisons is to look at downstream processing after H2O2 is synthesized. Today, they do liquid-liquid extraction, then distillation, then for high purity, they will do up to 5 sequential reverse osmosis operations. Because we do our processing in water rather than alkylated aromatics, we can use ultrapure water from the start...so we don't have to do much downstream processing to get an equivalent H2O2 purity

2. haha micromanufacturing here is relative. Today, an anthraquinone plant consumes the energy of a small city and is multiple football fields in size. They cost >$100m to make. Many of the customers that we talk to use $1-$5m per year of hydrogen peroxide but cannot justify investing in such infrastructure. Our units are modularly designed but will still be close to a football field in size. They address these medium-sized peroxide users that make up the vast majority of H2O2 end-use cases. Today, they pay as much in shipping as they do for the actual hydrogen peroxide. Our units seek to address this. How big is your garage though? Maybe we could make this work!

Thanks! We are finding that sub-ambient temperatures are working the best (ca. 10-20 celsius). For improving reaction rates, elevating pressure is much less energy intensive than elevating temperatures, and is extremely useful for improving dissolved oxygen concentrations. Currently, we use class 150 lb components and operate around 100 psig but are looking to test out higher pressures in the future for even better efficiency. Your match checks out, but we also use a pressure swing adsorption system to send in >95% O2 rather than 21% air. We also use a proprietary sparging unit to get super-fine gas bubbles with low rise velocities. Enzymes appear quite resilient to high pressures vs. high temperatures. I suppose this is because water is largely incompressible so it does not affect the enzyme geometry even at high pressures. Yes, we do need to care about hydrogen embrittlement (always a problem) but hydrogen processing is tried and true in the industry and we operate at pretty low temperatures. CAPEX-wise, we are around 10x lower (at equal production rates) because we combine several unit operations into a single unit and we have eliminated the need for a liquid-liquid extractor. Around 50% of the CAPEX costs and >50% of the energy costs with the current anthraquinone process are related to distillation. Because we are much more efficient, we are hoping to have smaller units on site with customers that will eliminate the need for distillation all together, which removes a large portion of both the CAPEX and operating costs associated with the traditional process

haha we talked to some rocket companies, and it isn't an area we plan to enter soon, but technically yes we could! Even with the current anthraquinone process, hydrogen peroxide is still a much "greener" monopropellant than hydrazine, although I believe monopropellants in general are not as popular nowadays.

Thanks, this is Solugen's biggest goal!

Our process doesn't produce water. The H2 comes from starch and the O2 is taken from the air. Catalysts are self-regenerating, although enzymes do naturally degrade over time.

Yep, this is correct! It largely depends on the country's electricity costs vs. access to natural gas. In some instances, rather than methane steam reforming, dry methane reforming is also used. Currently, almost all large-scale peroxide plants using the current technology (the anthraquinone process) are built next to natural gas reforming plants.

Currently, the H2 comes from waterplitting that occurs in the photosystem II of plant cells. We are now working on a system where the H2 comes from bulk water electrolysis, which is now more efficient than plant cells

Great question! The reaction is actually thermodynamically downhill and spontaneous (delta G less than zero). The current manufacturing processes use palladium catalysts that do have an activation barrier that requires heat. Enzymes are much more efficient and can catalyze this reaction even below room temperature.

Hey! We're really excited too. The biggest challenge with reactor design is getting excellent oxygen mass transfer (called the Kla "Kay el aye"). Typical fermentation reactors see a background dissolved oxygen concentration of around 8 ppm. The enzymes in the cell can see much lower concentrations, around 1 or 2. Our reactor delivers 450 ppm of dissolved oxygen to nearly every point in the reactor, greatly boosting the kinetics (and efficiency) while also mitigating the effects of H2O2 inhibition on the enzyme. Second, our reactor is also the separator (we use molecular weight cutoff membranes) so that we can continuously remove the peroxide as we make it while retaining the enzyme. The last challenge is materials. Metals decompose hydrogen peroxide and also leach out slowly into the water, lowering purity and reducing the shelf life. Thus, we are using a lined reactor. For non-peroxide producing enzymes, we can design a 316L steel version of our reactor for interested customers that is less expensive.