Host: Guillaume De Dorlodot
Guest: Benjamin Ng | Co-Founder | AromatEco
Category: ☁️ Carbon Reduction
Podcast’s Essential Bites:
[5:20] “At AromatEco we are bioengineering microorganisms and giving them the ability to produce carbon negative chemicals. […] We are targeting the flavor and fragrance industry sector first before we scale. […] The whole goal is to decarbonize the chemical industry.”
[14:44] “Generally the whole chemical industry consumes about 11% of global energy. And with that, they emit 7.5% of global greenhouse gasses, and that's about 4 billion tons of you know gasses. And it's insane, because it's also going to become the largest driver of global oil consumption by 2030. So if you imagine how much fuel all the cars in the world take and how much fuel all the flights in the world take, the chemical industry is going to use more fuel in 2030 than both of those things.”
[15:50] “[Methanol, ammonia, and high value chemicals] are considered base chemicals. So they [are] used to make other different chemicals, which will then in turn be used in almost everything you see in your daily life. And these are what I like to call silent killers in climate change. Because, you use your shampoo, you use your bar of soap, you use your chair, your furniture, everything that we consume as a human has some form of chemical being added to it or being used in its production process. So is everywhere, it's just that we don't see it. And that's why it's so important to target this industry.”
[17:25] “Those base chemicals probably sell for about one dollar per kilo, or 50 cents per kilo or even less than that. Where we are right now is selling chemicals that are worth about a few hundred dollars per kilo. And where we want to go as we scale is to be able to scale the technology in such a way where it's commercially viable for us to start selling chemicals that are around one dollar per kilo or less.”
[18:42] “Chemicals are mostly produced by synthesizing fossil fuels. […] That's why it's so cheap to produce chemicals. […] In the flavor and fragrance industry, it's also synthesized through fossil fuels. […] There are two categories, there is the non-natural, artificial version, synthesized version and the natural version. So the synthesized versions are all synthesized through fossil fuels. But the natural version is extracted through nature, so tropical agriculture, [where] they have to cut down trees and […] that's pretty unsustainable as well.”
[28:41] “We produce these individual chemicals that will be used as ingredients in the taste profile. […] The flavor and fragrance companies, they will be taking many different individual chemicals and putting them together in different ratios to form different tastes. So the smell or the taste of an orange probably has […] for example five different chemicals that are in there. And we produce those five different chemicals for the taste of an orange. We don't mix them together, we don't give you the taste of an orange, we just give you the individual chemicals. And that's what we do with the microbes.”
[37:10] “The aim is to be a B2B wholesaler of these chemicals or manufacturers. So we manufacture it, and then we sell the chemicals to maybe suppliers, traders or the [flavor and fragrance companies] companies themselves. […] We would actually be selling the chemicals at around 50% cheaper than then market chemicals right now on the natural side of the natural market.”
Rating: ⚡⚡⚡
🎙️ Full Episode: Apple | Spotify | Google
🕰️ 56 min | 🗓️ 02/04/2022
✅ Time saved: 54 min
