Godavari Biorefineries Limited preparing to manufacture biobutanol, biobased ethers, biobased esters; and d9 Designs augments caffeine with the hydrogen isotope deuterium
🌍🧪Net-Zero Specialty Chemicals
Godavari Biorefineries Limited (GBL) moves closer to the production of net-zero, biobased cosmetic intermediaries and ingredients with the inauguration of a new biochemical facility in Maharashatra, India, this month.
Net-zero manufacturing is manufacturing with no greenhouse gas emissions, or manufacturing that balances the amount emissions produced with the amount of greenhouse gas that the facility removes from the atmosphere.
And while GBL has some 60 years of experience in the bio-chemicals industry, the new venture is very much a work in progress. In an interview published in India Chemical News just over a week ago, Samir S. Somaiya, Chairman and Managing Director explains, “We are working with customers closely to see whether we make a drop-in product or it could be a green substitute with slightly better properties so that the substitution may create a better category of product.”
“Traditionally,” he reminds us, “these things don't happen overnight. You are not substituting a fossil commodity with a green commodity…because it has a very different economic base. It takes time to work with customers. Godavari is definitely looking to work on bringing in new products in the next financial year.”
Current plans are to produce biobutanol, biobased ethers, biobased esters at the new GBL facility.
☕️💋Hope in a Hydrogen Isotope
A new US – based ingredient maker called d9 Designs is hoping that a tech transfer from pharma can change the way beauty makers formulate with caffeine.
The hydrogen isotope deuterium is used in pharma applications to change how a drug is metabolized, which often then also alters the toxicity properties of that drug.
Bradford C. Sippy, Co-Founder of d9 Designs, believes this ingredient is “the first innovation in the caffeine molecule;” and in his remarks to the press this week calls, “d9-Caffeine…a once-in-a-generation disruptive technology that has the potential to transform the worldwide caffeinated beverage industry and adjacent markets.”
This week’s press release enumerates the advantages of d9-Caffeine in beverages. And whether attributes such as rapid and prolonged stimulatory effects or the reduction in the formation of caffeine metabolites (in contrast to conventional caffeine) have relevance in topical products is not clear (to me).
But one of those adjacent markets the company would like to sell the ingredient into is ours: “As our next step,” says Sippy, “we look forward to the first commercial introductions of Deura9™ (d9-Caffeine) in both beverage and cosmetics products to demonstrate the potential of this highly differentiated new form of caffeine.”
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