The Bio-Acetone Breakthrough: How Braskem and Lallemand Are Unsticking the Future

Rochester, New York. Winter, 1942.

Harry Coover rubbed his thumb against his forefinger again.

Still sticky.

He frowned. The beaker refused to let go of the bench. The pipette clung stubbornly to the flask. A glass stirring rod seemed determined to remain permanently attached to whatever it had touched only moments before. Every experiment ended the same way—with another impossible mess.

This wasn’t supposed to happen.

Across the Atlantic, Allied aircrews urgently needed better optical gun sights. Eastman Kodak had asked Coover’s team to develop a new crystal-clear plastic. Instead of clarity, he had produced frustration.

Another failed compound.

Another residue to scrape from expensive laboratory glassware.

Perhaps somewhere in the laboratory sat an ordinary bottle of acetone, ready to dissolve the sticky nuisance and wipe the morning’s work away. Had every trace disappeared that day, history might have taken a different course. Or perhaps not. Innovation has a habit of surviving accidents—but it also depends on the clues we leave behind.

Coover put the compound aside.

Years later, he took it down again.

The world would come to know it as Super Glue.

The bioeconomy has always lived at this curious intersection between things that stick together and things that come apart. Yesterday, Braskem and Lallemand Biofuels & Distilled Spirits (LBDS) announced a technology built around the other half of that equation.

Not the world’s stickiest molecule.

One of its most useful solvents.

For decades, the global biofuels and biochemicals sector has searched for commercially viable renewable replacements for petrochemicals. On July 28, Braskem and LBDS unveiled a bio-acetone production platform designed specifically for the corn ethanol industry. More than another coproduct opportunity, it represents a new way for biorefineries to diversify revenues while reducing exposure to the volatility of fuel markets.

A Bolt-On Opportunity

For decades, the ethanol industry has found itself economically stuck. Plants have become extraordinarily efficient at producing fuel, yet many remain tethered to a single primary revenue stream whose fortunes rise and fall with gasoline demand, policy mandates and commodity markets. The challenge has never been making ethanol. It has been escaping ethanol’s gravity.

The partnership combines LBDS’s proprietary engineered yeast with Braskem’s separation technology.

During fermentation, the yeast produces bio-acetone alongside ethanol without reducing ethanol performance. Braskem’s bolt-on separation system then removes the acetone from the fermentation broth, allowing existing ethanol facilities to produce a renewable chemical without fundamentally redesigning their plants.

Perhaps the most significant feature isn’t biological at all.

Braskem has committed to developing the market for—and purchasing—the bio-acetone, providing ethanol producers with an established commercial pathway rather than asking them to become specialty chemical marketers overnight.

Craig Ammann, Vice President of Business Development at LBDS, described the collaboration as another tool to strengthen producer economics and reduce market volatility. Braskem’s Cirilo Vieira framed it as another step toward decarbonizing the chemical industry itself.

In that sense, Braskem isn’t simply introducing another coproduct.

It is introducing a solvent for one of the industry’s oldest business problems.

Why Acetone?

Acetone rarely receives headlines, yet more than eight million tonnes are consumed globally each year.

It quietly dissolves paints and coatings. It helps manufacture acrylics. It serves cosmetics, personal care products, adhesives, pharmaceuticals and countless industrial processes. Unlike glamorous breakthrough materials, acetone succeeds by helping everything else move more easily.

The new bio-acetone is chemically equivalent to conventional acetone, but produced entirely from renewable feedstocks. It is benzene-free, phenol-free, and its renewable origin can be verified through radiocarbon (C14) analysis, making it attractive to manufacturers seeking lower-carbon supply chains without changing downstream formulations.

For ethanol producers facing uncertain fuel demand, shifting regulations and persistently volatile margins, access to an established eight-million-tonne global chemicals market represents more than diversification. It represents resilience.

An Industry That Refused to Let Go

Braskem’s commitment to commercialize and market every tonne of bio-acetone may prove just as important as the fermentation technology itself.

History suggests why.

In 2019, Green Biologics closed its renewable acetone and butanol facility in Little Falls, Minnesota. The chemistry worked. Customers existed. But like many first-generation biochemical ventures, the company became stuck in the difficult space between technical success and commercial scale. It never secured the financing needed to reach cash-flow break-even.

Many technologies would have ended there.

Instead, the residue remained.

In 2025, International Process Plants leased the same 40-million-gallon fermentation facility to Nuol Green Chemistry, giving the infrastructure another chance. Sometimes industrial progress doesn’t arrive through brand-new steel. Sometimes it arrives by rediscovering what was left behind.

Elsewhere, the momentum has continued.

Scotland’s Celtic Renewables recently shipped its first commercial cargoes of bio-acetone and biobutanol from Grangemouth. In Asia, LG Chem has already commercialized ISCC PLUS-certified bio-balanced acetone derived from renewable feedstocks, supplying manufacturers throughout the region.

Meanwhile, researchers continue pushing beyond traditional fermentation.

Fermentation has always presented an awkward engineering problem. Desired molecules are often produced in relatively low concentrations, leaving engineers to separate tiny amounts of valuable product from enormous volumes of water. Purification can become as expensive as production itself.

That is why Braskem’s bolt-on separation technology, TU Delft’s purification research, and Hiroshima University’s engineered Moorella thermoacetica all point toward the same prize: making separation cheaper than creation.

Researchers at TU Delft have developed improved purification methods for acetone produced from industrial waste gases and syngas, addressing one of gas fermentation’s longstanding bottlenecks. LanzaTech has pursued similar pathways through syngas fermentation with support from the U.S. Department of Energy.

Researchers at Hiroshima University have taken a different approach by engineering Moorella thermoacetica, a heat-loving bacterium that naturally vaporizes acetone as it is produced. Rather than forcing engineers to separate dilute liquids afterward, the molecule effectively separates itself.

Sometimes the easiest molecule to purify is the one that decides to leave on its own.

The Digest’s Bottom Line

Harry Coover thought he had created another laboratory nuisance.

Instead, he had left behind a residue worth remembering.

The bioeconomy has spent decades learning how to create value from residues—corn stover, forestry slash, waste oils, municipal waste gases and agricultural byproducts. Increasingly, it is learning something equally important: how to remove the residues that slow commercialization itself. Chemical residues. Process residues. Economic residues. Commercial bottlenecks that leave industries stuck long after the science has moved on.

The greatest commercial technologies are not always those that make more product.

Sometimes they make more options.

Steam removed dependence on the wind.

Containerization removed dependence on the dock.

Braskem and Lallemand’s bio-acetone platform may remove dependence on a single commodity.

That may prove to be the most valuable solvent of all.

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