Trillium partners with Zeton to design sustainable acrylonitrile plant

Trillium Renewable Chemicals (Knoxville, Tenn., U.S.) has announced its partnership with Zeton (Oakville, Ont., U.S.) to design a demonstration plant to convert plant-based glycerol into acrylonitrile, deemed “Project Falcon.” The Trillium-Zeton partnership kicks off the design phase of the project, which paves the way for low-carbon footprint apparel, toys, cars, medical gloves, planes and many more products.

Following a $10.6 million Series A financing round in December 2022 and $2.5 million award from the Department of Energy’s Advanced Manufacturing Office in June 2022, Trillium successfully built a pilot plant that produced acrylonitrile from glycerol. Trillium’s pilot plant continues to operate and will provide product samples to customers for validation. Information collected during these pilot trials will be used to design the Falcon plant.

“We are thrilled to partner with Zeton in the next stage of our commercialization journey,” Erik Scher, Trillium’s newly appointed board chair, says. “Demonstrating Trillium’s technology at a larger scale will allow our customers to verify product quality at scale, a key milestone in our path to becoming a leading producer of renewable chemicals.”

Operation of Project Falcon will be used to verify process economics and product carbon footprint at a large scale. A new focus will be given to achieving operational performance criteria (e.g., plant uptime), demonstration of key equipment in final form and successful qualification as a supplier of acrylonitrile.