THE NICOTINE FIX FOR E-CIGARETTES Companies in nascent business seek highquality supplies of their KEY INGREDIENT MICHAEL MCCOY, C&EN NORTHEAST NEWS BUREAU
Either way, the nicotine is obtained by ing up the tobacco industry in the U.S. extraction from tobacco, generally in India and around the world. Consumption of or China, followed by purification, in Asia e-cigarettes is soaring as traditional smokor Europe. Chemical synthesis is possible ing declines. On the defensive, big tobacco but not economically practical, because firms such as Philip Morris and Reynolds nicotine is a chiral molecule that would American are entering the e-cig business. need to be separated, a step that can be Cigarettes are tobacco leaves wrapped both tricky and expensive. in paper. E-cigarettes are essentially chemE-cigarettes are still small potatoes icals wrapped in plastic. But the products compared with traditional cigarettes, but have two things in common: They are both the lines charting consumption are movvehicles for delivering nicotine, and they ing in opposite directions and may one day both get it from tobacco. cross. Bonnie Herzog, a tobacco For e-cigarette makers, the stock analyst at Wells Fargo source of that nicotine and the Securities, estimated last year N N purity in which it arrives are matthat 2013 e-cigarette sales would ters of increasing importance exceed $1 billion in the U.S. and CH3 as their business matures from that they could surpass sales of Nicotine the unregulated free-for-all it traditional cigarettes in the next is today. Consequently, a growdecade. ing number of companies—including the The companies involved are also small first producer in the U.S.—are jostling to but growing. Wisconsin-based Johnson become the emerging industry’s nicotine Creek Enterprises, which calls itself the supplier of choice. first U.S. firm to produce nicotine-conTraditional cigarettes deliver nicotine taining liquid for e-cigarettes, was formed to the lungs when tobacco, which is up to in 2008. Johnson Creek says it’s one of the 3% nicotine, is burned and the smoke is fastest-growing private companies in Amerinhaled. Along with the nicotine, however, ica and the largest U.S. supplier of e-liquid. comes a cocktail of nitrosamines, polyNicVape, another leading e-liquid supcyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and other plier, is less than four years old. Larry compounds that have been proven to cause Pritchett, the firm’s chief marketing officancer. cer, explains that founder Richard Henning E-cigarettes, in contrast, are tobaccostarted NicVape to purchase nicotine— free devices that look like a traditional cigawhich presents a skin absorption hazard rette or a plumper relative. Inside is a heatat full strength—and dilute it with propyling mechanism for vaporizing a mixture ene glycol or glycerin for sale to e-liquid of propylene glycol, flavoring compounds, companies. and up to 2.5% nicotine. In some products Over time, NicVape began adding flathe mixture, known as e-liquid or e-juice, is vors and selling its own finished e-liquids contained in a disposable cartridge. In othto consumers via its website and to other ers the smoker—or vaper, as practitioners firms in bulk through contract manuare known—adds it to a refillable chamber facturing agreements. Today, Pritchett with an eyedropperlike dispenser. says, about half of NicVape’s business
DOUGLAS R. CLIFFORD/ZUMA PRESS/NEWSCOM
BUSINESS
ELECTRONIC CIGARETTES are shak-
is e-liquids and half is diluted nicotine. Along the way, Henning and Pritchett learned that not all nicotine is the same. Fine chemicals companies had long supplied pharmaceutical-grade nicotine for smoking-cessation products such as gums, lozenges, and patches. But the product was expensive and often in another form—a ditartrate salt for gums, for example, or bound to an ion-exchange resin for patches. Chinese suppliers abounded, Pritchett says, but their product quality was uneven, and their documentation was scant. Plus, the companies often had to falsely label their nicotine as ink-jet toner or other products to get past Chinese customs authorities. “I want to know how pure it is, what’s in it, and can you give me documentation that supports that,” Pritchett says. The Chinese companies, he and Henning found, could not meet those standards. TWO YEARS AGO NicVape came across Al-
chem International, an 80-year-old Indian manufacturer of botanical extracts that was wading into the e-cigarette waters. Alchem has been NicVape’s primary nicotine supplier ever since, Pritchett says. As NicVape has grown, so have its purchases from Alchem: from 5 L per month in 2012 to 900 L today. For Alchem, the agreement with NicVape followed years of supplying pharmaceutical-grade nicotine and derivatives to the smoking-cessation market from its U.S. Food & Drug Administrationinspected plant in Haryana, India, near New Delhi, according to Laurent Leduc, head of Alchem’s U.S. operations. “That’s
“When we asked some of them if they could handle nicotine they would say, ‘Yes, no problem, I do it in my own kitchen.’ ” CEN.ACS.ORG
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DELIVERY DEVICE
E-cigarette samplers, on view at a store in Clearwater, Fla., hold a mixture of nicotine, flavor, and propylene glycol.
what brought us to e-cigarettes,” he says. Like the nicotine it sells for smoking-cessation products, Alchem’s NicSelect brand for e-cigarettes is tripledistilled to U.S. Pharmacopeia standards in a facility that complies with current Good Manufacturing Practices, Leduc says. In addition, Alchem produces it with an e-cigspecific flavor and color profile in mind. For the time being, more nicotine is consumed in smoking-cessation products than in e-cigarettes, according to Torsten Siemann, managing director of ContrafNicotex-Tobacco (CNT), a family-owned German firm that has supplied nicotine for more than 30 years. CNT produces a 40% nicotine solution in India and then refines it to pharmaceutical standards in Switzerland via a contract manufacturing agreement with Siegfried, a venerable fine chemicals manufacturer. Siemann claims that his firm supplies the vast majority of the nicotine used in the world’s smoking-cessation gums and patches.
CNT’s first inquiry about nicotine for ecigarettes came a little more than four years ago, Siemann recalls. At first, he says, CNT was reluctant to supply some of the new companies that knocked on its door. “When we asked some of them if they could handle nicotine they would say, ‘Yes, no problem, I do it in my own kitchen,’ ” he relates. BUT AS BIGGER PLAYERS entered the
market and CNT was able to inspect their facilities, Siemann and his colleagues became more comfortable about doing business with them. Today, he figures, CNT supplies roughly half the nicotine consumed by the global e-cigarette market. The size of that market is hard to pin down, but CNT estimates it at 10 to 20 metric tons per year. It’s also a market that is doubling every year, Siemann says. Today e-cigarettes consume 20–30% of pharmaceutical-grade nicotine. If current growth rates continue, he expects e-cigs to surpass smoking-cessation uses within the next three to four years. Thanks to ample refining equipment at Siegfried’s site in Zofingen, Switzerland, CNT can easily supply 10 times the current world market for nicotine used in e-cigarettes, Siemann says. Leduc makes a similar claim for Alchem’s plant. But anticipating a desire for U.S.-made ingredients, a new company has begun producing trial amounts of nicotine in North Carolina. Called AmeriNic, the firm is a joint venture between Universal Corp., the world’s biggest supplier of leaf tobacco,
and Avoca, a botanical extracts company that is owned by Pharmachem Laboratories, a maker of ingredients for foods and nutritional products. The nicotine is extracted in Merry Hill, N.C., where Avoca already extracts the fragrance ingredient sclareol from the clary sage plant. The partners are being tightlipped with details about the venture, but they tell C&EN that AmeriNic has begun production runs and continues R&D to optimize the extraction and distillation processes. Capacity, they say, can meet current U.S. market demand. AmeriNic promises that its nicotine will be based on “fully traceable and compliant tobaccos,” language that is a nod to what everyone involved with e-cigarettes is anticipating: FDA regulation of the industry. The agency first stated its intention to regulate e-cigarettes in 2011 but has since blown past several self-imposed deadlines to do so. Now industry participants expect action later this year. “We are really looking forward to regulation,” NicVape’s Pritchett says. He figures his company will benefit from industry consolidation as smaller firms find they can’t afford to comply with new rules. Until then, Pritchett intends to remain vigilant regarding the nicotine and other raw materials NicVape buys. Although Pritchett insists he’s committed to his relationship with Alchem, he is also eager to see new suppliers like AmeriNic help tame the industry. “It’s so brand new,” he says. “It is still kind of a Wild West out there.” ◾
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