Public Funding for Cashew Shell Biorefinery CSBR Ltd

We propose to transform the production of important aromatic chemicals that are currently made from petrol to being made from a food waste that is not competing with food for land. Most things we use or touch have been made by the chemical industry and most of these are originally derived from fossil fuel based resources. As fossil fuels deplete and because of major concerns about their implication in global warming and climate change, it is essential that we develop processes to make things with similar properties and effects to those we have and need now but derived from renewable resources. This means that we must grow the raw materials in plants, fungi, algae etc. but the plants we need to grow these renewable feedstocks must not use land that is currently used to grow food. Ideally, such resources will be wastes from e. g. food or paper production or will be non-food by-products of such processes. We have identified an oil found in the shell of cashew nuts (cashew nut shell liquid, CNSL) as an especially suitable resource. It is not edible, has few uses and is available at about 1 M tonnes per year at a low price. Most importantly, CNSL contains only a few chemicals and they have very interesting and exciting structures. If the oil is treated further via heating and distillation, we can extract up to 70 % cardanol. CSBR Ltd, the applicant for this project has licensed technology developed by the University of St Andrews (USTAN) , which consists of new chemical processes for making green and non-toxic bases from cardanol for a wide range of applications across the industry: surfactants, adhesives, fire resistant additives, coatings, detergents, insect attractants, fragrances and pharmaceuticals. The overall project concerns setting up a biorefinery based on cardanol, using the licensed technology, to make two platform chemicals in two sequential steps. The part of the project to be covered by the Transformative Technology grant will allow us to make the second step of the process ready for scale up. The first step is already more advanced and is being prepared for scale-up.