After almost 20 years of trying to make chemicals from biomass and plastics, the start-up Anellotech is liquidating. The firm has filed for a form of bankruptcy in Texas and hired the consulting firm DSI to sell its pilot plant, intellectual property, and business interests.
Anellotech launched in 2008 to commercialize a thermocatalytic process that turns biomass into a mixture of the polymer starting materials benzene, toluene, and xylene (BTX). The firm pivoted around 2022 to waste plastics as its input and in the past couple of years sought to produce sustainable drop-in fuels by hydrogenation of the aromatic molecules generated in its processes.
About a year ago, Anellotech announced a successful vetting of its cracking technology and plans to commercialize it at its facility in Silsbee, Texas, in collaboration with the plastic waste management consortium R Plus Japan.
The Texas plant is valued at about $18 million, according to a summary document circulated by DSI. It has a nameplate capacity of 0.5 metric ton per day and is located inside a larger facility owned by the chemical maker Trecora.
The liquidation also includes the intellectual property around plastic waste recycling and biomass refining as well as an array of contracts and business relationships with suppliers, customers, and technology licensees. Anellotech raised more than $95 million from investors during its lifetime, according to the summary.
DSI and Anellotech representatives declined to comment on why the company is dissolving. But the closure is the latest in a string of struggles for companies looking to displace petrochemical routes to commodity chemicals or high-volume specialties.
Decarbonization of the transportation industry is, ironically, making it harder to replace fossil petroleum with greener chemical feedstocks, says Steve Friedewald, founder of World Search Consultancy. Friedewald was the market development lead for the biobased ethyl acetate maker Viridis Chemical, which shut down abruptly earlier this year. As electric vehicles eat away at the global market for gasoline, he says, oil companies are retooling their refineries to shift output away from fuel and toward BTX and other starting materials for chemical and polymer production.
“The world doesn’t need any more BTX,” Friedewald says.
Chemical start-ups have an especially difficult time making business plans work because they’re often dependent on the investment schedules of venture capital funds that want to exit at a profit in 5–10 years. Oil interests backed by state-owned enterprises and sovereign wealth funds, Friedewald says, are more free to match decades-long market trends and better able to weather short-term cash shortfalls and adverse business cycles.
