Direct greenhouse gas conversion to lactic acid

Direct conversion of greenhouse gases is what we call our "moonshot" project, and we've seen promising technical developments through our research to date. Over five years, and with some real investment, we successfully developed an alternative feedstock technology that can convert methane into lactic acid. We also now understand the technology, the potential, the capital requirements, and the likely operating costs of this alternative. We believe that while this technology offers some improvement in operating and production costs, economic conditions reflected in the low cost of oil and very low cost of sugars mean that the capital outlay to build a facility for this technology doesn’t make sense given the incremental savings. For us, this becomes a technology option to exercise at the right time. It's an option that we have rights to in perpetuity and that we can draw upon when the economics support such an investment.

In direct GHG conversion, we can bypass the need for agricultural feedstock by converting methane and carbon dioxide into lactic acid, the building block for our Ingeo biopolymers.