I completed this project as part of an US Department of Energy-funded internship at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in partnership with Visolis.

Visolis is a startup company that has engineered microbes to produce compounds suitable for serving as a building block for many bioplastics. One of these compounds is a lactone, which can be reduced to the corresponding diol by hydrogenolysis. In order to improve its utility, I developed a method to convert it a diol, which can be used as a plasticizer to promote flexibility in polyester resins. The hydrogenolysis of the lactone with a copper based catalyst was optimized to determine if the process is viable on an industrial scale. Yields of 91% were accomplished with a small scale batch reactor, prompting me to scale up to a larger continuous system.

This process of transforming the bacterially derived lactone into a diol allowed Visolis to complete a pathway from biomass to polyester resins. Since I completed the project, this pathway has been optimized and scaled up to create bioplastics that are cost competitive with petroleum based polymers. The same lactone can be converted to a diacid through an oxidation process already developed by Visolis. The combination of the diol and diacid in the presence of a catalyst allows for the production of green, sustainable polyester resins to reduce the future impact of climate change.

Date: June 2016 - August 2016