PX Marks the Spot: Reflections on the Anellotech story

I first visited Pearl River, New York during the July 4th celebrations of 1986, when the Statue of Liberty turned 100, and amidst tremendous traffic jams owing to the holiday, I discovered a path to Tuxedo Park that did not require chancing the crowds near Paramus Mall, and I have returned many times to Rockland County since. 

Most people who know the town, know it for the Pfizer campus, or as the town with the funny name because there is no Pearl River in Pearl River, just Muddy Brook. 

Anellotech is there, in the Pfizer part of town, and I’ve watched with fascination the story of its evolution from a promising catalytic pyrolysis technology to a company with real prospects in Asia and elsewhere for those looking for low-carbon alternatives to fossil-based plastics.

It’s ironic that Pearl River is of course the great actual waterway of Guangzhou, they call it Zhujiang there, China’s third-largest port.  Just downriver, in Hong Kong, Sir Li Ka-Shing had his start in plastics manufacturing, en route to building one of the world’s largest and most dynamic enterprises known since 2015 as CK Hutchinson Holdings.

So, like most people, I’ve been more acquainted with the Pearl River plastic story in Guangzhou than it’s smaller New York cousin. Yet, lately I have found myself thinking more and more upon Anellotech’s prospects. 

One Revolution at a Time

What appeals to me is this. Anellotech has exactly one great innovation to achieve — reinventing intermediates used to make everyday plastics such as the clear plastic bottle. They’re not trying for a novel molecule, a new supply chain, via investors with no experience in the field, scientists with no grounding in the arts, carbon credits of ephemeral value, or any of that. They have simplified and focused the development story in a way that de-risks the overall enterprise. 

Very good news from Planet Anellotech has arrived. They’ve signed a global joint development agreement with Technip Energies to work cooperatively to further develop and then license Anellotech’s Plas-TCat process, a one-step thermal-catalytic recycling technology that converts mixed plastic wastes back into its constituent basic chemicals, with a focus on benzene, toluene, and xylene that can be used to make most virgin plastics. 

I have no doubt about the appeal of PET plastic and the demand that our dizzying international trade places upon secure, see-through packaging with robust barrier properties. The pandemic only strengthened my faith in plastics so long as trade continues to open and spread; consumers are now separated from manufacturing by greater distances and mysteries than ever before. 

Anyone who has not been on a tour of the outer planets these past ten years knows of the loud critique of plastics — on the grounds of its origins in petroleum, the problem of waste, and the dispersal of plastics in bodies and seas. 

Yes, everyone understands. Yes, everyone is sympathetic. Yes, we all agree. Yet, noise is not change, hope is not transformation, wishes are not technology.  I have heard the clamor of the critics and seen bottled water sales rose 73 percent between 2010 and 2020, says here, despite the noise.

Anellotech does not solve all the world’s ills, or even all the ills of plastics, but it provides an alternative for the petroleum problem. To back up one moment into a technical point, there are two essential components in PET plastic, ethylene glycol and paraxylene. Making biobased ethylene glycol is a solved puzzle, the problem lies in paraxylene and Anellotech’s process produces BTX molecules, the xylene is the X, paraxylene is abbreviated as PX, and PX marks the spot, so to speak, the spot on the map where the treasure lies.

PX has established markets, players, prices — all the glittering prizes that lenders and investors crave. I wonder often if they should be so fixated on these items to the exclusion of others, but there’s no doubt that they are. Leaving us with just the one challenge, though a mighty one, to find an affordable, reliable, scalable means of making biobased xylene. Hence, Anellotech. Hence, it’s appeal. The world doesn’t have to change its habits, just the raw materials. That’s easier.

The Long Walk to Freedom

But easier is not the same as easy. It would be delightful to report that, a few months after the 2020 formation of the R Plus Japan JV in Japan to foster commercial deployment of the Anellotech process, that projects were established, biomass at the ready, final investment decision just moments way.  Or, to report that Suntory had proceeded on its own, and partners went to the devil.

Instead, we’ve had the gentle zephyrs of the winds along the Hudson River to listen to, not the huzzahs of happy groundbreakers, ringers of NASDAQ opening bells, or the pleased and delighted chortles of project partners counting the molecules coming down the manufacturing line.

Maybe it is a good thing, which I might illustrate with a variation on the old parable of the Old Man Who Lost His Horse

A righteous technology company had a righteous sponsor. For undisclosed reasons, the sponsor declined to build a project all by its onesey. Everyone felt sorry for the righteous technologists. But a friend advised them, “Who knows if that won’t bring you good luck?”

Some time later, the righteous sponsor returned with a consortium of co-sponsors. Everyone congratulated the righteous technologists. But a friend advised them, “Who knows if that won’t bring you bad luck?”

Time passed, and the consortium had not built a project. Everyone felt sorry for the righteous technologists But a friend advised them, “Who knows if that won’t bring you good luck?”

The parable advises us that good luck and bad luck are dancing partners; the conditions that breed success are beyond our ken. Who is to say what would have happened to an Anellotech project if the green light had been given say, in 2020, and then the pandemic’s supply chain constraints blew out the timelines and inflation blew out the costs.

Barbarians at the Gates

Having stated the reasons to meditate upon the good luck that delay may represent, I suppose I find myself ranged not with the thoughtful scholars of classical China but with the barbarians at the gates, impatient for swift change, disdainful of delay. There are countless reasons to avoid first-of-kind projects and only one reason to pursue them at all — for the same reason that parents have children. What will become of the world if it brings forward nothing new, for all the good reasons to avoid the sorry fates of most ideas?

Why did adventurers sail across the oceans in the 16th and 17th centuries? Why did the Dutch slip across the Hudson to found the hamlets of Rockland County? Why did anyone bother to invent plastic? In the latter case. it certainly was not because there were well-understood opportunities in clear plastic bottling. Back then, no one needed a clear plastic bottle because no one had thought of it.

Why take chances when the rewards of success are slim? One wonders — Anatole France used to write of “a long desire”, something that impels us to chancy acts whether it is to produce molecules without certain success, or go over Niagara Falls in a barrel.

A Duty of Care

Then, I think of an opaque brown bottle, containing ginger beer, served to May Donoghue on the evening of August 26, 1928 in a cafe in the town of Paisley, Scotland. A snail had made its way into the bottle, half dissolved in the liquid, and Mrs. Donoghue contracted a case of severe gastroenteritis upon imbibing. She sued for damages, and the English Law Lords developed the tort of negligence in finding in her favor. Bad luck for Mrs. Donoghue she took ill, good luck for the world that a concept of negligence has found its way into case law. Bad luck that manufacturers had a newfound liability when they sold beverages in dark bottles; good luck then they discovered, via PET plastic, a way to make the packaging transparent and with strong barrier properties.

In writing for the majority in the landmark case Donoghue v Stevenson, Lord Atkin referenced an 1883 obiter dictum by Lord Esher in the case of Heaven v Pender, which makes the case, perhaps best of all, as to why the world needs Anellotech technology, despite the costs, despite the risks, despite the uncertainties. It has to do with the risks of a complete reliance on fossil oil and gas, though Esher was writing of a case involving painters and faulty ropes. Esher wrote (the bolding is mine):

Whenever one person is by circumstances placed in such a position with regard to another that everyone of ordinary sense who did think would at once recognize that if he did not use ordinary care and skill in his own conduct with regard to those circumstances he would cause danger of injury to the person or property of the other, a duty arises to use ordinary skill and avoid such danger.

A duty of care arises, that’s the point. 

Has one arisen in the world of plastics? To the extent that we might raise up a biobased industry as a means of taking ordinary care? That’s a question for all to consider, and in considering we might also think upon the scale at which oil and gas operates today and the extent to which there can be complete remedies, or alternatives to the whole. Is that an argument against the biobased industry — that it cannot solve all of the problems it addresses? I have heard that stated in the past.

PX marks the spot

By way of answer, let me turn to a favorite of mine, Sir Thomas More. He wrote:

“Things will never be perfect, until human beings are perfect. What you can’t put right you must try to make as little wrong as possible.”

And that, I suppose is why I believe that PX marks the spot and Anellotech might be onto something.