Two Unrelated Thoughts That Might End Up the Same Place:
Chemistry in Public Service, and Green Chemistry for Commodities

William F. Carroll, Jr., Ph.D.

ACS President-Elect 2004

April 24, 2004

Thanks very much. It’s an honor to be here, and especially to be speaking at the same symposium and Dr. Cue and Dr. Anastas, two giants in the field of Green Chemistry.

I also have been touched by the warm hospitality of the faculty and Student Affiliate here at UT-Martin including Dr. Airee, Manesh Patel and the rest of the officers.

I have to tell you that there is no better job in the world than being President-Elect of ACS. First off, you don’t have to work anywhere near as hard as the President does but you still get to meet thousands of truly remarkable and dedicated students and professional chemists.

A number of people asked me the first thing I was going to do as President. My first thought was to raise taxes on the physicists. What you actually do first is get to work on the things you’d like to accomplish in what turns out to be an unbelievably short three years in the Presidential chairs.

From campaigning last year and talking to literally thousands of members I found three issues that seemed to resonate with a majority of those I spoke to. First of all, many members are concerned about globalization and the impact it will have on chemistry—industry, government and academe.

Consider:

• The US now has the world’s highest cost natural gas, which is not just a fuel it’s a raw material for the industry
• Companies are global and are locating so as to serve those markets locally
• Fewer students are opting to come to the US to study as the higher education systems in their countries improve
• Many large businesses are consolidating with concomitant reductions in force
• Do we have too many scientists, or too few?

To address these and other questions we’re going to engage in a Society-wide project to try to understand where our field is going and isolate where the opportunities are in the next ten years. We’ll build this bottom-up through a series of sessions at the Spring National Meeting, collecting and collating the thoughts expressed and we’ll augment that with some outside thoughts from experts at the fall meeting. In the end, we will produce a short monograph that describes the best thinking on where we’re going and how, as individual members, we make the most of the changes that are coming.

Second, I’d like us to take a closer look at high school education. Sixty percent of high school students take chemistry, but few will take it from a chemist. While campaigning last year many members whote me long letters about their chemistry teachers who inspired them into science 50 years ago. We have a shortage of chemistry teachers who actually chose chemistry as their field, but I believe these are the people, still jazzed about the topic, who make the best teachers. I’d like us to explore how we bring more chemists to teaching—whether at the beginning of their career or at the end; how we involve them in ACS and whether we’re providing value for them; and whether we can augment the experience and capabilities of the perfectly wonderful teachers on the job today who are not chemists.

The third has to do with how the public perceives us. Many of our members—particularly those who have given most of their adult lives to chemistry as a career—believe that the public takes the benefits of chemistry—and for that matter, the problem-solving potential of chemistry for granted. They are concerned that the public has been taught that chemistry stinks, goes “bang,” and fouls everyone’s nest. And they’re right to be concerned. When you make miracles commonplace as chemistry has done, it’s easy to take a miracle for granted. It’s only been three generations since the public water system in the US was a source of deadly disease; we first started to disinfect water in 1909. Curiously, that was the same year that more people came out of hospitals alive rather than dead.

And this is the part of my agenda I’d like to highlight today. My remarks come under the heading of thanks and a challenge. First of all, speaking both for myself and for the Society, I want to thank you for volunteering your time and talent on behalf of our profession. Both civil society and chemists are the beneficiaries of your actions, and I hope you find the work you do as satisfying for yourselves as it is gratifying for others.

And now I want to offer you a challenge. I’d like to ask for your help in presenting the benefits case for chemistry.

But in order to deliver that benefits message, first you have to get the microphone. I believe that service to society is one big way in which we can both inspire our colleagues to involvement and also attract the attention of the public.

People are interested in personally relevant benefits—“What’s in it for them,” so to speak. And in complementary fashion, most people are also interested in donating some part of their time and talent to helping to solve problems and make things better for those who could use a hand. In my experience this is particularly true for young people, but not their exclusive province. My point simply is, channeling the individual desire for connectedness with those who can use our help into a project that allows us to make a larger point about the science we practice and its practical application provides a good result for all.

Picking a service project as a means of communicating with the public is a bit tricky: it has to be interesting to the audience and to the media, within your skill set, worthy of your commitment and easy to adapt to show the benefits of chemistry.

Your activities at schools—doing demonstrations or teaching during National Chemistry Week or on Earth Day are good examples. Additionally, striking an alliance with a local group can help you get your start. Working with Big Brothers/Big Sisters has great public appeal—whether you’re teaching the next generation of scientists or the next generation of scientifically literate citizens, you are making a difference.

In my business, we’ve done this for years with Habitat for Humanity. When they do a blitz build—erecting houses in less than a week—it’s always something to watch and it’s usually newsworthy. What’s more, all of us who have built with Habitat, and I’ve done four or five blitz builds myself, find it a profoundly moving experience to, by dint of your own action, help someone help themselves out of substandard housing.

Habitat, as an example, gives us the opportunity to introduce ourselves as chemists and remind people that modern shelter is impossible without chemistry: it holds the plywood together, it’s the paint, the vinyl siding, the house wrap, the insulation…all impossible without the science of transformation we know as chemistry.

I’ve heard of organizations that established a “Fifth Saturday Club” wherein the fifth Saturday of any month is automatically the service day. It happens once or twice a year and is not too burdensome. If you establish yourselves with a particular service project and become associated with it—as, for example, Lions Clubs have with projects related to sight—it almost advertises itself.

Paint a shelter and talk about chemistry in construction; teach kids about washing hands and talk about chemistry in sanitation; hold a food drive and talk about chemistry in agriculture and food; volunteer as science mentors at primary schools—be a hero and demystify at the same time; think broadly and try things.

Linking chemistry and chemists with everyday life and everyday people shows the universality and utility of our craft. Our value is clear when we integrate service with our science, and outcomes with our outreach.

So here’s what I’m asking: Lead us. Try new ideas and share best practices. Devise projects that 1) serve the community; 2) attract interest; and 3) illustrate the benefits of chemistry. Show us how it’s done. Opinions change one by one, and your actions can be the agent of that change.

And now I’d like to digress a bit and give a few of my own perspectives on Green Chemistry, the topic chosen by our other two speakers this afternoon. We haven’t coordinated this at all, and I apologize to them if I’m taking part of their presentation.

The three of us come from very different parts of the chemistry enterprise. Dr. Anastas comes from government; Dr. Cue comes from a background of elegant synthesis of high value products. I come from commodity chemical manufacture, and I’ll explain a bit of the difference in a few minutes.

I have been engaged in sustainable development activities related to my job for about seven years now. Sustainable development is, in its own way, a paradoxical statement. Sustaining something seems to imply keeping it the same. Developing something implies evolving or changing it.

Some forward thinkers recognized that the 80% of the world that doesn’t have our lifestyle would eventually want it, and the 20% of us that already have it would not want to give it up. They started a discussion about ways of maintaining high standards of living for the developed world, while allowing the developing world to reach higher standards of living as well without requiring four times the resources currently in use. To be blunt, the problem devolves to what happens to the availability and price of gas when a billion Chinese have Suburbans?

Nearly 20 years ago, Gro Harlan Brundtland described the aspirational solution to this problem—sustainable development--as “meeting the needs of the current generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.” In other words, continuous, or sustainable development without running out of everything. We can discuss offline whether, in the 21st century, we can come to a consensus view of the border between “needs” and “wants.”

While that definition is probably a good one, it doesn’t say much about how to make that happen or how to measure if it is happening. For that we can turn to John Elkington, founder of a company called SustainAbility. Elkington likes to point to what he calls the “triple bottom line.” Now, in business when we talk about the “bottom line” we mean the net profits of the business. It’s the scorecard. Elkington suggests that there are really three bottom line categories for our times: The traditional one, Economic, Environmental and Social . SustainAbility says:

“ At its broadest, the (triple bottom line) is used to capture the whole set of values, issues and processes that companies must address in order to minimize any harm resulting from their activities and to create economic, social and environmental value. This involves being clear about the company’s purpose and taking into consideration the needs of all the company’s stakeholders – shareholders, customers, employees, business partners, governments, local communities and the public.”

As I see it, these are the same principles that underlie Green Chemistry. Chemistry, done correctly, is profitable, minimizes its footprint on the environment, and provides products that make access to a good life more equitable and affordable across geographic and socio-economic borders.

EPA’s definition of Green Engineering is similar to the “triple bottom line”:

“The design, commercialization, and use of processes and products, which are feasible and economical while minimizing 1) generation of pollution at the source and 2) risk to human health and the environment.”

But both of those are kind of a mouthful, and so for some people it’s easier to explain Green Chemistry as “reducing or eliminating the use of hazardous materials.” That’s a part, but in my opinion it is insufficient.

Here’s why, in a couple of examples.

Example 1: Designing a more environmentally benign process that has a markedly increased cost and provides no discernable customer benefits over a competitive process will never be commercialized. And it’s not green if it stays in the lab. See Elkington’s triple bottom line in here?

Conversely, here’s example 2. Many of the things that have been done to reduce the cost of individual chemicals and allow them to grow in volume are indistinguishable from principles of green chemistry. That’s because there are very few ways of taking the cost out of production of a material, and most of them come down to eliminating waste or becoming more labor, capital, material or energy efficient.

Let me expand on that point a bit. Chemicals have a growth cycle. Virtually all of them start out as laboratory curiosities. There are literally millions of chemicals that have been given a Chem Abs number. When they enter commercial production at small scale, they are called “fine chemicals” are very expensive, and may find a home in custom synthesis. Think on the order of a few hundred pounds a year, and maybe 50,000 chemicals. If they are broadly useful at a competitive price, demand increases and they can grow to be “specialty chemicals.” Think up to maybe 10,000,000 lbs/yr and a few thousand chemical identities.

Some materials have extraordinary utility and can be made so efficiently and inexpensively that billions of pounds are made. These materials are called “commodity chemicals” and there are really only a few: sulfuric acid, nitrogen, oxygen and ethylene (which we will discuss in a minute) are examples.

Commodity chemicals are such basic building blocks that they have very long product lives. The ten top chemicals in pounds produced annually have hardly changed in thirty years. It’s difficult, for example, to find a better all-purpose alkali than sodium hydroxide.

There is, in general, an inverse relationship between the price of a chemical and the amount of it that is produced. There is generally a direct relationship between the utility of a chemical and the amount of it that is produced. And to complete the trifecta, small amounts manufactured generally translate to small environmental needs, and large amounts reasonably translate to increased need for environmental performance.

As the utility or demand for a material grows, chemists and engineers streamline the synthesis chemistry and increase the size of the “pots and pans” to reduce the cost per pound, and allow for more production. We call this “economies of scale,” and you may be familiar with the concept.

The real leverage for Green Chemistry techniques is at the laboratory curiosity or fine chemical phase when you’re still optimizing synthetic parameters like reaction conditions, solvents and the like. On the other hand when you reach commodity scale, pretty much the only knob you have left to turn is energy intensity, although you may make incremental improvements in efficiency or catalysts. And a billion dollar investment in a plant is tough to totally redesign or for that matter to abandon. Few people will simply walk away from a $10,000 automobile. Even fewer will toss away a billion dollar investment.

In this sense, I also see a rough continuum between Green Chemistry and Green Engineering. As you’ll see in a minute, Green Chemistry is most useful for small volume specialty materials; Green Engineering is most useful as you scale a process up, ultimately to billions of pounds a year.

There are two ways you can approach “greening” a commodity chemical. One is to improve the process.

Consider the production of ethylene—C2H4. Ethylene is used in the production of virtually every plastic you come in contact with on a daily basis. It is the highest volume organic compound. There are two processes used to make ethylene, both of which involve “cracking.” Cracking is the process of breaking molecules up and reforming them into lower molecular weight materials, and usually the processes involve high heat and a catalyst. Curiously, the opposite of cracking is “coking,” but that’s the topic for another lecture. For ethylene, you can either crack naphtha, which is a hydrocarbon of about C10 and above, or you can crack ethane. Since that’s conceptually simpler, and is the majority of ethylene capacity in the US, we’ll stick with that.

Now, for an ethane cracker, the yield of products is virtually quantitative: about 84% is ethylene, 3% propylene, 3% butadiene, 4% butenes, butanes, and the remainder is either the equivalent of natural gas or fuel oil all of which has economic value. There is a small amount of material that builds up as coke in the process and must be cleaned out a couple of times a year, but as you can see, you’re using all of the pig but the squeal (as they say in the meat business). 85% of the cost of the operation is ethane, fuel and electricity in a 1.5 Billion lb/yr plant.

With a process this efficient you no longer have solvents, blocking groups, stoichiometric reagents or any of the other “chemistry” variables to work on. The only place you can realistically make a difference is energy, because it is a very high temperature process.

With that in mind, however, the US Department of Energy recently granted $3.2 MM to Dow, Pacific Northwest National Labs and Velocys to develop a bench-scale “microchannel” ethylene process. The technology is proprietary but seems to be based on smaller, flow through reactors that are designed to reduce the amount of energy input to the process.

It’s difficult to say, when the capital cost to build a plant is taken into account, whether this process beats the existing process; it’s also hard to say whether existing plants could be retrofitted. But it’s a big risk for a potentially big gain. If you could save $0.01 in energy costs on 70 billion pounds of ethylene made in the US each year, it’s $700 MM. Not bad. And what’s more, some of that reduced cost cascades forward in the chain of commerce to customers who make polyethylene, or trash bags or house wrap or other materials, and everybody wins.

The other approach to “greening” is to eliminate a product and replace it with something else. This is an absolutely huge risk, because you have to teach everyone downstream how to use this new product, and it has to work in all the billions of pounds of applications. On the other hand, it stands the chance of paying huge benefits. We have a good example of that in play right now as Cargill-Dow works to make polylactic acid—a biodegradable material--replace many applications of other plastics. We’ll see how it turns out.

So my first take-home lesson is: as students, it’s good you’re learning the principles of green chemistry. It’s not good enough to design a reaction that gives you a spiffy molecule at 5% yield using benzene as a solvent. It wasn’t even a good idea cost-wise in the last century, but in this century, you surely must think harder. Drive the efficiency up. Drive the waste down. Think about what it will take to build a plant and keep the workers safe and the government happy. Don’t stop with “a solution,” work for better ones, and do it at the beginning of the process, not twenty years down the line.

And make sure that you don’t live in the laboratory all your lives. Learn a bit about economics, customers and business plans; sales and marketing; think about the total life cycle of your products. Here’s something to think about a bit: the environmental impact of many products is during the use phase and not manufacture or end-of-life; and you have to keep track of all three phases in order to know whether you’re moving things forward or missing the boat.

Most of all, if you keep the “triple bottom line” in your mind, and balance all three: economics, environment and society, you may still find yourself less than perfect, but you’ll have done better, and that’s the idea. Do better.

And I can tell you from research and experience that to improve the public’s perception of any situation, the first job is “Doing Better.” People know it’s tough to solve a problem, but they’ll take it off the “Worry List” if progress is being made.

And the other take-home lesson is: chemistry is solutions. It’s science and stewardship in action for the benefit of human kind. Don’t just tell the public how we serve them, show them. They’ll listen a lot more closely.

And I appreciate how closely you’ve listened to me. Thanks very much.