Does a chemical plant in Slovakia show the way to a greener industry?

BANSKÁ BYSTRICA, SLOVAKIA—Industrial biotechnology is working in the rolling hills of central Slovakia. There, the specialty chemical company Evonik Industries is using engineered microbes to ferment a surprising array of chemicals that includes biosurfactants, pharmaceutical ingredients, feed supplements, biopolymers, and small molecules.

It’s a long-term investment that the chemical industry—in Slovakia and other countries—needs to learn from if it wants to create more products from renewable raw materials instead of petroleum.

“We have examples here where you can substitute a five-, six-, or seven-step synthesis with a biotech process that runs in one little asset,” says Tim Pohlmann, global head of fermentation for Evonik’s health-care division. “This doesn’t work for every molecule, of course, but for some it does. You need sugar, you need energy, you need water and some ingredients, all of which you can get locally.”

Fermentation is a proven route to a few high-volume chemicals such as ethanol and citric acid, as well as high-priced fine chemicals such as enzymes and drug molecules. But the chemical industry in Slovakia and elsewhere has struggled to make it work for specialty chemicals, which sit in the middle of those markets in terms of production volume and price per kilogram. Evonik’s plant is succeeding, though, and managers are expanding its output. It’s a win for the company and an example that the government and business community in Slovakia are working hard to learn from and replicate.

The site in Slovakia

Banská Bystrica is a small city of about 76,000 residents, located about 220 km east of Slovakia’s capital, Bratislava. The 2 h drive between the cities slaloms among golden canola fields that stretch to the horizon. Befitting the area’s mountainous topography, mining was the central industry in previous generations—the Slovak word banská means mine, and many towns and villages have Banská in their name. Mines led to an early prominence for the area in metalworking and manufacturing.

One modern-day fruit of that industrial history is Evonik’s fermentation facility, which sits 15 min from the city center, in the village of Slovenská Ľupča. The plant is called Fermas, a concatenation of the German words for fermentation and amino acid. And indeed, the plant started back in the 1990s by making proline, methionine, and other amino acids needed to boost the protein content of animal feed.

From that start, Evonik has adapted subsets of the plant’s 23 fermentation tanks and its reconfigurable downstream processing unit to several organisms making many different substances from agricultural raw materials. The firm has used the site to explore what chemicals microbes can make profitably, and along the way it has built enviable institutional knowledge and technical capability. It’s not the only site in the world making specialty chemicals via fermentation, but it may be the most successful.

Fermas has made headlines in the chemical industry in recent years for reaching commercial-scale production of rhamnolipids, a biosurfactant that pairs hydrophilic rhamnose sugar heads with hydrophobic fatty acid tails. Evonik’s marquee customer for rhamnolipids is the consumer product maker Unilever, which launched a hand-dishwashing liquid with the ingredient in Chile in 2019 and has since expanded it to Vietnam, Indonesia, and Thailand. Unilever is positioning rhamnolipids as a more sustainable replacement for surfactants made from petrochemicals and tropical oils.

It’s important to understand that Evonik scaled up its production of rhamnolipids by building a dedicated downstream processing facility for the product line, not by adding more fermenters. The fermentation house with its 50,000 L reactors tends to attract the most attention, but Evonik has been using and upgrading those since the 1990s. What the company spent hundreds of millions of dollars to build this decade was the large building a few hundred meters away filled with the equipment needed to efficiently isolate biosurfactants once the fermentation is complete.

On the ground at Fermas

The route from a product-rich fermentation broth to a pure substance such as rhamnolipids is built around established downstream processing equipment such as membranes, centrifuges, and crystallization. Overall, Fermas has equipment and mastery on-site for about 14 types of separation steps—capabilities the team has built through the different fermentation programs that have happened at the site over the years, says plant manager Miroslav Havlik. A typical purification uses two to four methods, he adds.

Evonik keeps the isolation processes for biosurfactants a secret. On a tour of the facility, Havlik walked C&EN through the fermentation house, pilot labs, and combined downstream processing building that handles most of the products the facility sells. But he showed off the brand-new rhamnolipid purification plant only from the far side of the employee parking lot.

It’s an understandable precaution, as a strong cadre of firms are vying for a share of the emerging biosurfactants market. AGAE Technologies and Jeneil Biotech are making rhamnolipids at smaller but commercially significant scales, for example. A number of young firms, including Amphistar, Dispersa, and Holiferm, are scaling up sophorolipids, a related surfactant that uses sophorose heads. In fact, biosurfactants represent a large portion of the successful new specialty chemical fermentation efforts in recent years, alongside a handful of ingredients largely aimed at the home and personal care markets, such as enzymes, collagen and other proteins, and DNA fragments.

Evonik says Fermas has a rhamnolipid capacity in the double-digit kiloton range. But the exact output at any given time is a trade secret. That’s partially because sharing those numbers could help Evonik’s competition but also because flexibility is a hallmark of the site; it can scale up more as the markets for biosurfactants mature. Those markets include cleaning and personal care, coatings, and agriculture. Some firms are also using biosurfactants to boost the productivity of oil extraction.

The competition on biosurfactants is partially about volume and price but also about how light the color can get, how faint the odor can be, and how concentrated the product ends up. In addition, products vary on a few molecular parameters: the lipid tail can flap free or be closed in a ring, for example, and the polar head group can have one or more sugar groups.

Evonik has strong patent protection around the modified bacterial strains it uses for rhamnolipids, says Miroslava Čikošová, who leads the firm’s contract fermentation business in Europe. Like Havlik, Čikošová grew up in Slovakia—in fact, she’s from Banská Bystrica. The most productive wild-type organisms for rhamnolipid are pathogens that must be fed a mix of vegetable oil and sugar, she explains. Evonik instead used genetic engineering to give a low-biohazard organism, Pseudomonas putida, the biosynthetic pathways it needs to make rhamnolipids from a single feedstock of corn sugar.

Using just sugar—or sugar and vegetable oil for some other products at the site—makes the plant’s supply chain more secure and sustainable, Čikošová says. Instead of sourcing an array of raw materials from China and elsewhere around the world, Fermas can get most of what it needs from nearby farms.

Gene editing, cell-bank techniques, and process engineering have come a long way in recent years, Čikošová says. In addition to widening the array of chemicals that can be made with microbes, the tools have extended how long a fermentation can run and how stable a production strain stays between runs. For example, she says, genetic drift was a problem in the 20th century, but it’s not in the 21st. All those factors lower the cost of fermentation, she says, making it competitive with more-established thermochemical synthetic methods.

Evonik is repeating the rhamnolipids scale-up playbook with pharmaceutical ingredients, which it manufactures on a contract basis for drug companies. In April, the firm announced a $94 million investment at Fermas. When C&EN visited, crews were already preparing the parcel of land where the company will construct and outfit a new building for dedicated downstream processing of pharmaceutical products.

About half the overall capacity at Fermas makes chemicals that Evonik will sell on the open market, Pohlmann says, and half is contract manufacturing for other companies. Originally, the plant had identical 50,000 L reactors. As the site’s products diversified beyond amino acids, the engineering team modified individual fermenters to nurture each new fermentation program, he says.

“Fermas is the scale-up and launch hub of Evonik,” Pohlmann says. Most products start at petri dish scale in the firm’s biotech R&D center in Germany or in customers’ labs before coming to Slovakia. Some, like the rhamnolipids, stay long term. Others move to dedicated plants elsewhere, such as the L-lysine fermentation now centered at the firm’s facility in Castro, Brazil, he says.

“If you have a competent cook, the same kitchen can make Slovakian bryndzové halušky or German schnitzel,” Havlik says. (The former is a classic national dish made of potatoes and sheep cheese.) At any given time, various bacteria, yeast, algae, and fungi are hard at work making chemicals in different tanks. “We have built the fermenters to be switchable,” he says, and the downstream purification is customized for each fermentation.

Havlik would know. He was the technical and production director when the plant was built as a joint venture between Degussa, the German chemical maker that became Evonik in the early 2000s, and Biotika, a manufacturer of ingredients that still operates next door to Fermas. In fact, he says, Evonik purchased some real estate from Biotika to get the best plant layout for the new pharma downstream processing unit.

Where Fermas fits in Banská Bystrica

The regional government is optimistic that the success of Fermas—and of locals like Havlik and Čikošová—provides a model that other biotech and agricultural tech businesses can replicate in the area.

Ondrej Lunter is the governor of the Banská Bystrica Self-Governing Region, a large section of central Slovakia that includes the city of the same name. He says the region, and Slovakia as a whole, is transitioning out of a period when classic blue-collar work, especially automotive manufacturing, dominated the economy.

That transformation has often gone poorly, Lunter acknowledges. In an all-too-common pattern, locally owned and managed factories were bought out by foreign capital and later closed due to mismanagement and competition from low-cost operations outside of Europe.

“Fermas is a completely different story,” he says. Evonik, a German firm, purchased the site but then invested long term in both the facilities and the people. “It was not just a one-time opportunistic buyout; it was a really responsible step into the Slovak market,” he says.

Evonik doesn’t share financial performance metrics for its individual sites, but recent moves by the company suggest that it also sees the Slovak site as winner. As the firm is executing plans that will cut 6,000 jobs from its global workforce, the expansion in Banská Bystrica is going ahead and will add 50 new positions to its current head count of around 300, executives say.

Around 700 companies operating in Slovakia are completely or majority German-owned, according to Marco Trisciuzzi, the managing director of the German-Slovak Chamber of Commerce (AHK). Sustainability is a central concern for the German companies that participate in AHK and its sister organizations in other parts of the European Union, Trisciuzzi says. Evonik’s fermentation operations satisfy those concerns because of the carbon footprint and pollution advantages they can notch compared with petrochemical production, he says.

Slovakia’s power supply is 65% nuclear and 30% renewables, which Lunter says gives the country an edge whenever sustainability plays a role in investment decisions. And for specialty chemicals, a strong sustainability story creates a competitive edge in consumer-facing markets and for customers reaching toward net carbon emission targets.

Čikošová says that because Fermas can access clean power, most of the carbon footprint for the plant’s products comes from the corn sugar fed to the microbes. The firm is watching a handful of start-ups commercializing ways to ferment food waste into chemicals, including biosurfactants, and has its own research along those lines. But between nuclear electricity and sustainable agriculture practices, Fermas can already hit its customers’ sustainability metrics, Čikošová says.

The team is always on the lookout for additional environmental gains, Pohlmann says. “I strongly believe that the whole footprint of a typical microbial fermentation process is much, much smaller compared to a chemical synthesis. You come from one place, and you’re now in a much better place—doesn’t mean you could not be in an even better place.”

AHK organizes site visits and small conferences at which Havlik and other industrial plant managers share what has been working to make their facilities more sustainable. “You really see the best available technology for green impact,” including heat pumps, resource recovery, and waste reduction, he says.

Operational changes that come from that kind of collaboration usually reduce the plant’s operating costs while also increasing the value of its products by lowering their carbon footprints, Havlik says. “We’re trying to push against the idea that sustainability is unprofitable. When you have good people and support, you do miracles.”

Fermas as a seed for new industry

By itself, Fermas isn’t big enough to turn the region into a high-tech and biotech hub, Lunter says, but it is creating a virtuous circle. Evonik needs a staff educated in chemistry, genetics, engineering, and biology, and it has demonstrated that it’s sticking around. That commitment makes the facility a partner worth investing in with workforce development programs, he says.

The region has put more than $100 million into labs and other infrastructure for secondary schools, Lunter says. Complementing that work, Evonik’s presence and backing has helped the regional government win European Union grants at the grade-school level and forge partnerships with the Slovak University of Agriculture in Nitra and the Slovak University of Technology (STU) in Bratislava.

The resulting local supply of skilled labor has in turn brought other science-oriented businesses to the area. In addition to expansion at Fermas and a handful of food tech firms, Lunter says, the area is also winning investment in wood products, aluminum, and digital services, including artificial intelligence.

“That means kids with an education do not have to seek out jobs in the capital city or abroad; they are finding their employment here,” Lunter says. “Our main strategy is to create conditions where the young people do not have to leave the region.”

At this stage, though, the Slovak education system is graduating more scientists and engineers than the country’s manufacturing sector can employ, says Martin Rebroš, STU’s vice-rector for science, research, and international projects. Rebroš’s research examines genetic and enzyme engineering in microbes used by industry to make chemicals; he also leads an office working to cultivate a science start-up culture in Slovakia.

A large portion of the engineers, chemists, and biologists at Fermas are graduates of STU, and Evonik actively recruits from the university’s science and engineering departments each year. Rebroš says the school never has trouble placing students in industry positions, but Fermas has room only for a few most years. A larger number of the graduates find jobs in central and northern Europe.

“There are not enough companies in the region,” Rebroš says. “At the university level, we are trying to build up an ecosystem of start-ups and spin-offs,” especially in biotech, but he admits struggling to get traction with venture capital groups. Until investors become more aware of the potential in Slovakia, he says, students can’t become start-up CEOs as they do in entrepreneurial hubs like Munich, New York City, or San Francisco.

Rebroš and his team are developing a university-level investment fund to prime the pump. “Biotechnology is one field we have identified as business-driven and with high potential in Slovakia,” he says. Evonik has contributed a lot as a part of the community, and Fermas is an example of what’s possible in the region, Rebroš says. He’d like to have 10 more facilities like it.