Will L-methionine show a better environmental sustainability than DL-methionine?

Published: April 28, 2016

By: Joshua Koo

That mainly depends on the process efficiency of Methionine and not on whether the process is fermentation or chemistry. However, there is virtually no public data available on large scale L-methionine processes. Hence, a thorough analysis based on public data is not yet feasible and we need to base our assessment on our own estimations for the various fermentation and enzymatic processes in comparison with our own DL-methionine process. If we look at energy efficiency it is clear that the MetAMINO process is highly integrated in terms of energy consumption. Our estimations suggest that the MetAMINO process’ specific energy consumption is approximately half of that of the various proposed L-methionine processes. The global warming potential (i.e. the specific CO2 emissions) is more sophisticated to evaluate due to the conflicting rating of CO2 fixation by sugar producing plants on one side and the huge land use for those plants on the other side. On top, different waste streams for both process types have to be considered. At the end of the day we find in our calculations significantly more advantages for the highly optimized MetAMINO process than for L-methionine processes. Other sustainability criteria like acidification and eutrophication show also clear advantages for the MetAMINO process according to our calculations. In conclusion, we think that the chemical MetAMINO process looks “greener” than the so far proposed L-methionine processes. E-mail: joshua@unischem.com

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