Swiss specialty chemicals and catalyst producer, Clariant, has started-up its first commercial-scale cellulosic ethanol plant in Podari, Romania.

The context you need:

Pretty much all of the ethanol we use today (primarily for blending with gasoline) is made by fermenting glucose. Usually, we get that glucose by breaking down starch (the part of the plant, like corn, that we eat) with enzymes and then fermenting the result. Alternatively, we could get that glucose by breaking down cellulose (the part of the plant, like wheat straw, that we don't eat) with enzymes and doing the same thing.

So, what's going on here?

The enzymes used to break down cellulose are something like 40x more expensive than those used to break down starch. Apparently, Clariant's integrated enzyme process brings that down by 52%. So it's cheaper, but still roughly 20x more expensive. These high costs are why DuPont gave up on it about 5 years ago.

Bigger picture:

There's more going on here than just enzyme costs. Remember, the US and Brazil use ethanol as a gasoline oxygenate (at levels of about 10%) because the regions produce copious amounts of corn and sugarcane. That's not the case in Europe, so they use other additives like MTBE. But Romania is in the world's bread basket—and all of that wheat (flour) production means they have lots of waste wheat straw—which is Clariant's source of cellulose.

US-based specialty chemicals company, Albemarle, started-up its $500 million lithium carbonate expansion outside of Antofagasta, Chile.

Catching you up:

This site expansion has been planned for a while now and was initially planned for start-up back in 2020. The intent was to double production of battery-grade lithium carbonate from 44,000 tons per year to 80,000 tons per year. There have been a bunch of delays, most of them pointing to COVID-19 related uncertainty, but the site is finally up and running (with the intended new capacity).

Battery-grade lithium carbonate?

Albemarle makes lithium carbonate by extracting brine from under the Atacama salt flat, concentrating it to 6% lithium via open-air evaporation, and then processing it (at the site they just expanded). That lithium carbonate is combined with precursor metal oxide powders (PCAMs) to make cathode active materials (CAMs) like NMC, NCA, and LMO. We make cathodes with CAMs and use those cathodes to make lithium-ion electrochemical cells (which are combined to make batteries).

Zooming out:

If you haven't noticed, the electric vehicle (EV) market is taking-off—which means we're going to need a lot more lithium for all of those lithium-ion batteries. That's why Albemarle is also expanding its sites in China and Nevada. You can expect this to continue for the foreseeable future as demand for lithium continues to climb.