Origin Materials announces startup of world’s first commercial CMF plant in Sarnia

Origin Materials, Inc. of West Sacramento, CA, has announced it has begun startup of Origin 1, the world’s first commercial CMF plant, located in Sarnia, ON, in-line with prior guidance.

According to John Bissell, co-founder and co-CEO of Origin Materials, “this plant substantially scales up our revolutionary core technology platform.

“We expect the power of our platform intermediates, CMF and HTC, to be transformative for the chemical industry and how the world generally makes things.”

The new plant will supply industry with intermediate chemicals and materials that can be used across a wide range of end markets, including clothing, textiles, plastics, packaging, car parts, tires, carpeting, toys, fuels, and more with an approximately US$1 trillion addressable market. The plant represents a significant scale-up of Origin’s technology platform for converting sustainable wood residues into versatile intermediate chemicals.

CMF (chloromethyl furfural) is a versatile chemical building-block that can be used to make numerous downstream products, including para-xylene, which is the precursor to PET plastic, and FDCA (furandicarboxylic acid), which can be used in numerous sustainable products and materials such as the next-gen polymer PEF (polyethylene furanoate).

The plant will also produce HTC (hydrothermal carbon), whose applications include sustainable carbon black for automotive tires.“We are thrilled to be making our intermediates available to industry on a scale never before achieved,” said Bissell. “The commercialization of a molecule like CMF is historic, on the order of an ethylene. After working with CMF for over a decade at pilot scale, we couldn’t be more excited to begin commercial production … in Sarnia.”