Issue 01/2016

Opinion
Biopolymers
will weather
the crash in
petroleum
prices
By:
Ron Buckhalt
Before you read this column, you should know that I retired
on December 31, 2015 as Manager of the (USDA)
BioPreferred Program. So anything I say here is as a
private citizen, not a government employee. However I was
involved with bioproducts for nearly 40 years and have some
institutional knowledge.
I would like to first thank, Michael Thielen for allowing me
a few paragraphs to reflect on advancements made in the
bioproducts industry over the last few decades.
But before we discuss the recent advances I think we need
to stop for a moment and think about how we got to where we
are today, particularly as it relates to bioplastics.
Humankind was using biobased products long before
they were called natural or some other new catchword. Our
paints, inks, coatings, dyes, lubricants, fuels, soaps, and other
industrial products were made from plants and animals. It
was only when petroleum was discovered in the 1860’s that
we begin to move to a hydrocarbon economy away from a
carbohydrate economy.
There was even an argument about whether we would fuel
our vehicles with plant-derived ethanol or petroleum-derived
gasoline, or even electricity, and books have been written on
the battles so I will not attempt to recount those issues, just
be aware of them as part of the changing landscape.
For the United States, in the 1930’s there emerged
something called the Chemurgic Movement. Several leading
industrialists and scientists felt we could create new industrial
markets for agricultural materials and help prop up agriculture
commodity prices. The 1938 Farm Bill created a series of US
Department of Agriculture (USDA) research institutes to work
on new industrial products using agricultural commodities.
These would become the Agricultural Research Service
where I worked in biobased technology transfer for 10 years.
Meanwhile oil prices continued to go up and down with wild
swings. Every time it seems biobased products were gaining a
foothold once again, the price of oil would dip and any market
advantage for biobased products disappeared. Finally, following
the first world oil embargo in the mid-1970’s it appeared
petroleum prices were only going one direction – up. This was
true right up until the last few years. As this is being written a
barrel of oil was priced at below USD 35. Gasoline in the U.S. is
below two dollar a gallon and there are predictions of one dollar
a gallon gasoline. It remains to be seen what impact these low
petroleum prices will have on the development of alternative
biobased feed stocks. However, many very large international
industrial chemical companies have committed resources to
develop alternative biological sources for many chemicals and
are making and selling commercial materials.
In the mid-80’s USDA published the findings of a Farm and
Forest Task Force that looked at how many acres of agricultural
products could be grown to meet industrial product demands.
USDA’s Economic Research Service even published yearly
updates about the number of acres or hectares that were
grown and used to make biobased products. But it was not
until 2002 that a decision was made by the Administration
and Congress to help develop markets for the tremendous
biomass in the U.S. Part of that 2002 Farm Bill was a provision
to create a biobased markets development program to include
a U.S. Certified Biobased Products label and to carve out a
federal procurement preference for the purchase of biobased
products. This was to become the BioPreferred program.
Michael asked me to talk about the role of bioplastics in this
movement. One of the first platforms to have success in the
marketplace was PLA, particularly for single use items. But
even that had many challenges and major investors pulled out
because the technology was not making any money. That is no
longer the case. Since those bold first steps there are at least
38 bioplastics MAGAZINE [01/16] Vol. 11