Elevance expands ingredient options with new catalysts

The Illinois-based company use vegetable feedstocks with a number of different catalysts to produce a range of specialty chemicals. According to Elevance, the new catalysts that will be available from XiMo, will significantly broaden opportunities.

“The XiMo catalysts enable us to make more of the kinds of products we have been talking about for a while now, such as specialty chemicals, emollients, surfactants and anti-microbials,”​ vice president of market sales and development for Elevance Andy Shafer explained.

According to Shafer the new catalysts will allow the company to both make more of the ingredients it already produces, often in more efficient ways, but also to create new ingredients with different functionalities.

“The simplest analogy is that we are going from point (a) to point (b) for our customers, and we now have different cars in the garage to enable us to do this,”​ he told CosmeticsDesign.com USA.

Lower price metals ​

XiMo’s catalysts are based on tungsten and molybdenum which complement the ruthenium catalysts Elevance already uses.

As tungsten and molybdenum are cheaper metals in comparison to ruthenium, the resulting ingredients could be more cost effective, Shafer said.

Metathesis technology ​

Elevance’s work with vegetable feedstocks is based on the metathesis technology, where, in the presence of a catalyst, atom groups in a molecule change places with each other.

“We use a proprietary technology, a novel chemical catalyst, to react with the unsaturated sites in the oils to restructure the molecule, exchanging a particular set of carbons for another. This brings new functionalities,”​ Shafer explained.