BUSINESS NEW HORIZONS Tomonoh (left), TDA President Michael E. Karpuk, Alford, and Murayama at the opening.
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FULLERENES BY THE TON Mitsubishi's Frontier Carbon expects a big market for buckyballs J E A N - F R A N Ç O I S T R E M B L A Y , C & E N HONG KONG
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AKE IT AND THEY WILL BUY.
This is essentially the business plan of Frontier Carbon Corp., the world's first company to produce fullerenes in multiton quantities. The nanotechnology sector has been surrounded by much hype. Frontier Carbon represents one of the most tangible attempts at turning the hype into commercial success. At its plant inauguration last month in Kurosaki, Japan, company managers were happy that their facility had been running for two months, but they were also worried about their ability to find buyers. Fullerenes, or buckyballs, are molecular spheres made up of 60 or more carbon atoms. Their discovery earned the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for Richard E. Smalley Sir Harold W. Kroto, and Robert F. CurlJr. The materials have since been the subject of intense interest in academic and commercial circles. Yet few fullerene-containing products have come to market, because the new materials have so far been more expensive than gold, Frontier President Shigeki Tomonoh says. This high price has led most companies to quickly abandon development efforts. Frontier's bet is that once cheaper fullerenes become available, industrial researchers who had lost interest will take a new look at the sexy molecules. Within a year or two, Frontier says, it will sell I HTTP://WWW.CEN-ONLINE.ORG
fullerenes for less than $300 per kg, a sharp improvement on the $40,000-per-kg rate that prevailed not long ago. Frontier now sells for about $4,000 per kg. The company will make various fullerene molecules according to customer requirements. Oddly, the first product incorporating Frontier fullerenes is a bowling ball sold under the brand name Nanodesu—"It's nano!" inJapanese. Fullerenes are added to urethane resin coating to improve the "controllability" of the ball as it rolls through both the waxed and unwaxed part of a bowling lane. Frontier expects that its fullerenes will in time find their way into thousands of applications, from long-lasting lithium-ion batteries to antiaging creams to pharmaceuticals. At present, about 300 companies, mostlyJapanese, are working with Frontier samples, Tomonoh says. The firm has received scant media coverage outside Japan, he adds, which mostly accounts for why the firm has been contacted by few potential customers abroad. Should a market for fullerenes develop according to Frontier's hopes, the company is in a strong position to ward off competitors, Tomonoh says. The firm's output is protected by material patents in Europe and several countries elsewhere. Such patents have not been issued in the U.S., he says. More important, Frontier makes fullerenes through a unique combustion
process that is quite different from the arc process now used by other firms. The process was codeveloped with TDA Research, based in Wheat Ridge, Colo. Frontier is the brainchild of George Stephanopoulos, a professor of chemical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology who directed R&D at Mitsubishi Chemical from July 2000 until a year ago (C&EN, Dec. 9,2002, page 16). He remains a company board member. A few months after joining Mitsubishi, Stephanopoulos determined that it excelled in carbon products such as the rubber filler carbon black. He invited Tomonoh and Hideki Murayama, now head of R&D at Frontier, to join his newly formed science and technology office in January 2001 and asked them to look at opportunities in carbon products. Tomonoh had been developing new applications for Mitsubishi's carbon fiber for 18 years. Murayama, who holds a Ph.D. in engineering from Tokyo University, is a nanocarbon expert. A few days later, Stephanopoulos met Mikio Sasaki, the president of Mitsubishi Corp., at a New Year's party Sasaki proposed an alliance to mass-produce fullerenes. Frontier, equally owned by Mitsubishi Chemical and Mitsubishi Corp.'s Nanotech Partners subsidiary, was formed less than a year later. BECAUSE OF Sasaki's own interest in fullerenes, Mitsubishi Corp. had secured the rights to basic fullerene technology patents as well as to product patents in Europe, Japan, Australia, and South Korea. Mitsubishi Corp. also holds a 40% stake in Fullerene International Corp. (FIC), a venture focused on developing the market for fullerenes. The other two partners in FIC are U.S. companies: Research Corporation Technologies (RCT) and Materials & Electrochemical Research Corp. (MER). RCT commercializes the 1990 patents on fullerene technology developed by physicists Donald R. Huffman and Wolfgang Kraetschmer. MER has been producing fullerenes and developing applications for them since they were invented. Tomonoh, meanwhile, was looking for ways to capitalize on Mitsubishi Chemical's expertise in carbon products. He and Murayama attended the April 2001 American Chemical Society national meeting in San Diego, where they heard J. Mike Alford, T DAs chief fullerene R&D scientist C&EN
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BUSINESS tons per year and has now been operating for three months. It uses burners built by TDA in the U.S. If the market develops, Mitsubishi hopes to raise capacity to 300 metric tons in the next two years. TDA, which developed its process with grants from the National Science Foun dation and the Department of Energy, is not supplying its burners to anyone else. "We have patents, passion for fullerenes, and financial resources," explains Murayama about TDA's allegiance. Other than the burners, producing high-purity fullerenes requires extraction and purification tech nologies, which Mitsubishi Chemical al ready employs in its pharmaceutical and basic chemicals businesses. If it becomes a commercial success, Frontier will be a rare area of brightness in Mitsubishi Chemical's lackluster portfo lio. In its all-out effort to restore prof itability over the past five years, the firm closed several of its Japanese operations, many of which are at the Kurosaki site where Frontier is located. One of the site's managers says Mitsubishi would welcome other companies at the site to help pay for fixed costs.
and a former student of Smalley's, describe his new process for making fullerenes by combustion. The Mitsubishi pair became quite excit ed when Alford showed a diagram that re sembled Mitsubishi's carbon black process. That ACS meeting was the beginning of a close relationship between TDA and Mitsubishi Chemical. The Japanese com pany bought a duplicate of TDA's pilot plant and set it up in Japan in May 2001. At 40 g per hour, it was then the world's largest fullerene production unit. Over the following months, Mitsubishi scaled up TDA's contraption, eventually building a prototype capable of producing 400 kg of fullerenes per year. Some of the early patents for produc ing fullerenes by a flame process were owned by Jack B. Howard, an M I T pro fessor of chemical engineering who is a col league and old friend of Stephanopoulos'. Howard was easily persuaded to collabo rate with Mitsubishi Chemical when Tomonoh visited him at M I T in 2 0 01. Alford and colleagues spent weeks in Japan to help Frontier set up the large-scale facility, which has capacity for 40 metric
Whether Frontier will indeed become an inspiration for the whole of Mitsubishi Chemical is not certain. Despite Frontier's low production costs and access to unique technologies and patents, it is still unsure whether there is a market for its products.
STRIKE A bowling ball with C-60 coating is the first product making use of Frontier Carbon's fullerene. "The biggest risk we face is that customers who didn't fully develop products with fullerenes due to high cost will now de cide that they don't want to develop fullerene-based products after all," Tomonoh says. •
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