Cool Corn Competition – A look behind NCGA’s 6 Consider Corn Challenge III winners

Sylvatex has been working on sustainable solutions made from biomass-derived oxygenates and free fatty acids useful as alternative diesel fuel or specialty chemicals for the production of cathodes used in lithium-ion batteries. Battery usage has been growing like crazy and in this case, Sylvatex’s tech can be used in off-road diesel and cathodes for battery production.

Sylvatex’s MicroX is a molecular system that took more than a decade to develop and uses renewable inputs to create stable, tunable molecular interactions. MicroX makes it possible to combine lithium and metals salts like nickel, manganese, and cobalt in a way that’s twice as fast, uses 70% less energy, and increases yields more than 10%. It also has the potential to raise the cathode performance while lowering costs by at least 20%.

Sylvatex also touts a new stable system that blends oxygenates into mid-distillate fuel (marine & diesel fuels) to perform better and reduce harmful emissions. This fuel has been proven to reduce particulate matter by 70%, nitrogen oxides by over 10+%, and the carbon life cycle by 70+% compared to ultra-low-sulfur diesel (ULSD). That’s twice as much as alternatives like renewable diesel at just 5% of the capital to produce.

Check out “Green Nanochem for Biofuels and Batteries: The Digest’s 2021 Multi-Slide Guide to Sylvatex” here.

Bottom Line

Corn – so much more than your favorite summer vegetable and ethanol. That’s what this NCGA challenge has shown us. The possibilities are endless and seeing so many different types of organizations from various regions coming up with new ways to replace fossil fuels with a plant is encouraging.