Our process

CHEMISTRY THAT MATTERS.

Nova Biochem is pioneering a new era in sustainable chemistry. We aspire to become a leader in producing circular aromatic chemicals and building blocks from pulp and agricultural side streams at industrial scale and at price parity.

Waste to value

Our hydrothermal process transforms pulp side-stream into high-value bio-aromatics through a scalable, circular, and carbon-negative approach. By 2032, we will be capable of producing 100,000 tons annually, making Nova Biochem one of the first to bring bio-aromatics to true commercial scale.

How it works

Creating value in three seamless steps.

1.0

Depolymerisation

Lignin is a by-product of pulp and paper industry; it forms an essential part of black liquor. Nova depolymerises lignin using chemistry of supercritical water right on site where it is generated with no pre-treatment.

Depolymerisation

2.0

Separation

Products are separated from water mostly following conventional methods and form a range of products like low molecular weight functionalised oligomers, dimers and aromatic monomers.

Separation

3.0

Recovery

Nothing is left behind; once products are separated brine, containing ‘cooking’ chemicals originally used to make pulp from wood, is returned to the pulp mill for recovery and reuse. Our process has no by-products, no waste, every gram is accounted for.

Recovery

Performance

Features that matter.

Key challenges often become opportunities and sometime key differentiators. Nova chose their engineering constrains with major focus on scalability and being industry relevant.

Access to feedstock

Securing access to biomass has always been a challenge to bio-based industries. Nova's technology is fully integrated with pulp mills utilising existing infrastructure. Seamless integration is possible through full flexibility of feedstock choice and purposeful design around how pulp mills operate.

Radical independence

Given complexity of bio-based supply chains Nova’s designed their solution to process feedstock in its original form. Depolymerising lignin it its original form before it has time to cool down with no reliance on any third-party process or requiring any changes in existing pulp mill bypasses plethora of challenges.

Continuous flow

While #1 and #2 reduce risks and secure access to feedstock, in isolation it is not sufficient for rapid and relentless scaling. A sub-second reaction time performed in continuous flow with a touch of secret sauce allows for elegant, low footprint and rapidly scalable solution.

< 1second

FAQs

Questions, answered with clarity

  • What is lignin exactly?

    Lignin is a complex polymer found in plant cell walls, making up about 30 percent of wood. It's been largely treated as source of energy in paper production, burned to generate steam and recover cooking inorganic chemicals. We break it down and convert it into valuable biochemicals that replace petrochemical derivatives.

  • How does the depolymerisation work?

    While water is abundant and well known to humanity as a benign solvent and requirement for life, when pressurised to pressure of over 2km of ocean depth and heated to almost 4x its boiling temperature it turns supercritical. This transformation makes it very reactive and much less benign! This state is quite rare in nature and human made world. Supercritical water is willingly breaks down lignin into its building blocks.

  • Why use lignin instead of petroleum?

    There are many reasons to step away from petroleum as a solo source of key materials like plastics, adhesives, coatings and many other more niche applications like vanilla flavour of your ice cream. Some of them are: severe CO2 emissions, finite nature of crude, geo-political risks, lack of control over extraction. Lignin offers a decentralised, circular, carbon negative access to same building blocks leading to cleaner and safer supply chains.

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    LOCATION

    Office: Unit 13, Heathcoat building, Science park, Nottingham NG7 2QJ, UK
    Lab: Unit 14, Faraday building, Science park, Nottingham NG7 2QP, UK