Biorenewables

Johnson Matthey is strongly focused on sustainability across its full business range. We believe that bio-renewable feeds offer environmental and sustainable opportunities which, when coupled with the best available catalyst and process technology, can also offer economically attractive routes to higher value chemicals.

Our focus is to take bio based feeds, essentially sugars and the acids and/or alcohols produced through fermentation or derived from oils and fats, especially where they are derived from non-food bio-renewable material, and upgrade this material into high purity and added value products for chemical and fuel applications.

We have an established track record having licenced our process technologies, developed initially for the petrochemical industry but modified and optimised for bio-renewable raw material, into a number of applications with over a million tons of annual production capacity based on bio-renewable feeds. JM supplies the catalyst to these and many other plants.

We also offer catalysts into the processing of natural based material for use within the food and pharma industries, for example into the production of edible oils and sugar applications.

We look for collaborative projects with bio-technology groups or end users that wish to investigate the opportunity to adapt classic chemical transformations and adopt them for the conversion of bio based feed material into high added value products across the process industries.

Research and development

Johnson Matthey has a broad range of research and development interests in biorenewables. Examples of current Johnson Matthey developments include:

• Tar and methane reforming catalysts for biosyngas applications
• Catalysts for upgrading of pyrolysis oil to products
• Catalysts for conversion of triglycerides into hydrocarbons
• Catalysts for the selective conversion of sugars to biorenewable chemicals
• Process optimisation of catalysts in biorenewable processes.