Citroniq, a Houston-based maker of carbon-negative materials, announced it has selected the site for the first of its four planned bio-based polypropylene (PP) plants in the United States.
The mega-site will be built in Falls City’s Mid-America Rail Campus in the state of Nebraska. The campus covers an area of 1,017 acres (around 576 football fields), is served by the Union Pacific railroad, and targets biofuels and manufacturing projects, amongst others.
The announced bio-based PP plants are a joint project between Citroniq and Lummus Technology, which recently co-founded $12 million towards the venture. The funding is expected to enable Citroniq to further advance the planning, design, and construction of its first ‘green PP’ plant in the Falls City.
The Falls City plant is scheduled to start production in 2029 and is expected to produce 400,000 tonnes of bio-polypropylene a year, which would make it the first plant in North America with this level of production capacity.
Citroniq has revealed it will use corn from Nebraska farms to produce ethanol and bio-based PP thereafter. The plant is part of the Nebraska BioEconomy Initiative, which aims to strengthen Nebraska’s economy and rural communities through creation of sustainable, high-paying jobs.
“Our vision is to create bio-plastics manufacturing hubs in the US Midwest that upgrade Nebraska corn into a wide range of durable plastics goods, while creating high paying manufacturing careers in rural communities,” said Mel Badheka, president of Citroniq Chemicals. “Nebraska is an ideal location for these hubs due to the availability of local ethanol feedstock, advantaged logistics to industrial plastics consumers and high-quality rail infrastructure to support the entire value chain.”
The plant will employ the Verdene PP suite of four technologies developed by Lummus: ethanol to ethylene technology, dimer technology, olefins conversion technology and polypropylene technology.
Lummus says it is the only technology provider able to supply all the proven, low-energy technologies to produce renewable green PP from biogenic ethanol.
Citroniq says the plant would capture and avoid 2 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions per year.