Business Concentrates FINANCE
Chemical stock offerings are off to a strong start in 2017. The German specialty chemical firm AlzChem plans an initial public offering (IPO) of stock in the first half. Huntsman Corp., meanwhile, is pushing ahead with the IPO of its titanium dioxide business—now without a textile chemicals component. AlzChem was formed in 2009 when Evonik Industries sold a business in chemicals with nitrogen-carbon-nitrogen bonding to a private equity firm. Now in the hands of three family-owned companies, Alzchem had sales in the first nine months of 2016 of about $265 million. AlzChem plans to raise up to $50 million that it will spend on a new plant for guanidinoacetic acid, a feed additive that animals convert into the amino acid creatine. Huntsman says the spin-off of its $2 billion-per-year business in the white pigment titanium dioxide and other additives is on track for the second quarter of 2017. It has chosen Venator Materials—venator is the Latin word for hunter—as the name for the new firm. However, in a change from previous plans, Huntsman now says its textile chemicals business won’t be part of the new company. CEO Peter R. Huntsman says improved pricing for titanium dioxide plus cash from business improvement opportunities will more than offset the cash flow Venator would have received from the textile chemicals business. “We expect Venator will be a premier pigments company unencumbered by excessive debt or other unrelated liabilities,” Peter Huntsman says. In 2009, an earlier TiO2 spin off, Tronox, went bankrupt because of unrelated liabilities.—MICHAEL MCCOY
AkzoNobel is calling on innovators to codevelop sustainable chemistries.
GREEN CHEMISTRY
AkzoNobel seeks global research collaborators If you are a career chemist, part of a research group, or a startup chemistry firm with ideas for sustainable technologies, then AkzoNobel would like to hear from you. For the next two months, the Dutch multinational is inviting would-be collaborators to come forward to help it solve several environmental challenges. The seven fields for which AkzoNobel is seeking solutions are highly reactive chemistries and technologies, sustainable alternatives to its current technologies, biobased sources of ethylene and ethylene oxide, biobased and biodegradable surfactants and thickeners, cellulose-based alternatives to synthetics, new plastics recycling methods, and wastewater-free chemical processes. The initiative, named the Chemicals Start-up Challenge, will be funded from $50 million that AkzoNobel recently announced it will spend on venture capital activities. AkzoNobel will work on the initiative with the management consulting firm KPMG. Potential collaborators are invited to submit their solutions on a website operated by KPMG. Teams at AkzoNobel will then work through ideas to validate and codevelop the best solutions. Anyone who registers an idea will get feedback from AkzoNobel’s chemicals experts. After the period for applications closes on March 16, AkzoNobel will select the 20 most promising and invite their originators to participate in a three-day workshop in the Netherlands. The winning proposals will be announced, and collaboration agreements with AkzoNobel will be signed on June 3.—ALEX SCOTT
RENEWABLES
Liquid Light goes to Avantium The assets of Liquid Light, a once-promising start-up that developed a process for converting carbon dioxide, water, and solar energy into a precursor for plastic water bottles, have been sold to the Dutch research firm Avantium for an undisclosed sum. One of C&EN’s 10 Start-Ups to Watch in 2015, Liquid Light was spun off of Princeton University in 2008 and had spent more than $35 million to develop its technology. The young firm was even among a select group of biobased chemical firms to participate in Coca-Cola’s “green” soda bottle program, called PlantBottle. However, by
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mid-2016, the firm’s CEO and chief scientific officer were gone, according to their profiles on the business networking website LinkedIn. With the sale complete, two Liquid Light employees have joined Avantium in Amsterdam and two others will consult with the firm, says Gert-Jan Gruter, Avantium’s chief technology officer. Also transferring to Avantium are more than 100 patents and patent applications covering electrochemical methods to make ethylene glycol for beverage bottles and other building blocks. Avantium, which also has an electro-
chemical research unit, will focus on perfecting Liquid Light’s electrochemical-cell hardware and on developing the technology for high-value chemicals such as oxalic acid and glycolic acid, Gruter says. A high-throughput experimentation specialist, Avantium has done research for chemical firms and worked with Coca-Cola to develop the new bottle polymer polyethylene furanoate (PEF). In October, Avantium formed a joint venture with BASF to build a multi-million-dollar plant in Belgium to make furandicarboxylic acid, a biobased feedstock for PEF.—MARC REISCH
CREDIT: HUNTSMAN CORP. (LOGO); AKZONOBEL (RESEARCHERS)
Chemical makers ready stock offerings
