Cargill and DOE to develop industrial products from oilseeds.

Cargill, Inc., Minneapolis, MN, has received a $1.9 million matching grant from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to develop a platform of new industrial chemicals from soy and other oilseeds. This platform will serve as the foundation for an oilseed bio-refinery in the future. Under the terms of the collaboration, the DOE and Cargill will share funding to advance the technology toward commercialization. The grant is part of a DOE program to develop new technologies for producing chemicals and fuels from sustainable raw materials, such as carbohydrates and oils.

Cargill will collaborate with Materia, Inc., and other partners in carrying out the project. Materia will bring to the partnership their proprietary olefin metatheses technology used to cleave and modify unsaturated oils, such as soy and corn oil, to produce mono difunctional olefins and other materials that would serve as platform chemicals for a broad range of chemical and plastic products. Under a previously announced agreement with Materia, Cargill has the option to acquire an exclusive license to commercialize discoveries made in the field of the agreement.