Sustainable chemistry spinout Lixea is preparing to build a 25,000 tonne/year biomass processing plant producing commercial volumes of novel materials
Lixea has developed a highly efficient process to produce fundamental chemicals from biomass sources. The heart of the company's process is a novel, powerful green solvent, called an ionic liquid, that was developed at Imperial by Dr Agi Brandt-Talbot, Dr Florence Gschwend, and Professor Jason Hallett. Lixea's unique, proprietary ionic liquids are less harsh and more recyclable than volatile organic solvents, creating a cost-efficient and highly sustainable approach that could underpin a biomaterials economy in which everything from packaging materials to adhesives and plastics are built from biomass rather than fossil feedstocks.
Biorefining isolates useful chemical components from the 2 billion tonnes of global annual waste biomass - derived mostly from rice and wheat straw, sugarcane bagasse as well as wood residue from farming, forestry, paper and furniture production. Unlocking this abundant sustainable source nonetheless remains a challenge. Component cellulose and lignin are polymers within biomass that form complex cellular networks which are difficult to break down and process in order to meet industrial requirements.
Lixea's CEO, Krisztina Kovacs-Schreiner, said: "We've worked relentlessly to find ways to replace polluting, fossil-based materials and expensive, harsh, energy-intensive processes in the development of important and widespread materials. Our aim is to transform the way industry thinks about these products by offering them a competitive, clean and sustainable alternative. And since the company was founded in 2017, we've made incredible progress."
Scaling to meet the future
The company broke ground on their Swedish pilot-scale plant in 2021 and has worked tirelessly since to refine its technology and test production processes with customers and industry partners alike. According to CEO Krisztina Kovacs-Schreiner, their next big milestone is in development already. "We are now working towards the design and building of our commercial demonstrator plant. This will be capable of processing 25,000 tonnes of biomass a year. It lets us evaluate our process at a much bigger scale and provides customers with raw materials in the quantities they work with".
The need to produce at scale is echoed by co-founder Professor Jason Hallett, who states that "Companies that buy cellulose don't buy it in small amounts. We need to be able to deliver tonnes at a time to satisfy their production demands."
As fellow co-founder, Dr Agi Brandt-Talbot, points out, Lixea's ambition to scale is astonishing: "When the demonstrator plant is completed, it will be the largest ionic liquid extraction process anywhere in the world. It's really exciting to see this next step!"
The company is currently finalising the details of a grant agreement with the European Commission, whose €40 billion Innovation Fund was established to secure Europe's carbon neutral future during the next decade. In 2025, the Fund will support 85 projects to the tune of €4.8 billion euros.
Along with the grant preparation, Lixea has been awarded the STEP Seal, recognising its contribution to the objectives of the "Strategic Technologies for Europe Platform". For its founders, this represents another incredible milestone in a journey that started in the research labs of South Kensington.
From lab bench to commercial volumes
Professor Jason Hallett joined Imperial College London in 2006 as postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Chemistry. An early research project saw him team up with PhD student Dr Agi Brandt Talbot to evaluate the use of ionic liquids as a means of dissolving wood chips.
Professor Hallet explains: "In the chemical industries, solvents are waste products. If we don't have a better use for something, we can use it to dissolve things. Ionic liquids are a huge class of compounds which are much better than the most common solvents like acetate or toluene. However, in some cases they can be complex and very expensive, which makes them unattractive."
An early research task identified some ionic liquids that were suitable. A moment of serendipity led to a key discovery, when samples introduced to the ionic liquid were not dried properly. "The prevailing understanding was that you shouldn't get ionic liquids wet. But we got much better results with this sample. And now we needed to understand what was happening, which led to further research," said Dr Brandt-Talbot.
Agi subsequently went to work for another Imperial spinout, Econic Technologies, while Jason continued to develop the research and won grant funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). At this point, Florence Gschwend joined as PhD student, looking to develop ionic liquid extraction. Agi rejoined in 2014 as postdoctoral researcher and with the founding team in place, their combined efforts led towards a viable commercial proposition.
Agi said, "Jason identified very early in the process that the way to make Lixea commercially viable was to find an ionic liquid that was cheap to synthesise but still highly effective." Jason agrees that this was key: "What we ended up with was an ionic liquid that cost about 1% as much to make but performed about 85% as well. When we combined that with the work Florence carried out making the process suitable for waste biomass, it significantly changed the economics."
Overcoming external challenges
Initially, the team considered licensing the technology as a commercial route, aiming to sell to established industry players. External factors made this a challenge, as Florence explained: "First, between 2014 and 2016 the global oil price dropped by around 70%, making fossil-based feedstocks much cheaper. Then a wave of early bio-economy investments failed. It was a difficult environment to try and commercialise a sustainable chemistry technology!"
The 2016 Paris Climate Accords changed the landscape by committing signatories to keeping global warming below 2C above pre-industrial levels, which brought a rejuvenation of interest in sustainable technologies, and with it some funding. Florence began entering entrepreneurship competitions and accelerator programmes, including the Althea programme (now We Innovate) and Climate Launchpad. "Suddenly halfway through 2017, I had significant prize fund winnings – and we decided we had a basis to form a company" she recalls.
Alongside entrepreneurial programmes, Lixea's founders were able to count on colleagues for support. "When we were first pitching the idea to investors, Professor Nilay Shah helped us produce a model evaluating the economics of the idea. Combined with our lab-scale demonstrations, this was invaluable in getting people to believe our company could work." Agi said.
Jason maintained his academic role while the company incubated within the laboratories of the Departments of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering. Florence, who found herself as CEO of the nascent enterprise following her PhD studies, found inspiration in her contemporaries: "One of my close colleagues and friends, Dr Clementine Chambon, took part in some of the same accelerator programmes as I did. Her attitude of getting out there and trying to make things happen was infectious – I realised I could do the same."
Today Sweden, tomorrow the world
Lixea's journey is testament to hard work, innovation and international cooperation. Its multinational team has taken a little-known niche technology through exhaustive rounds of funding to a working pilot plant proving laboratory results at scale. Now the company is planning to build its commercial demonstrator to produce material in industrial quantities, reclaiming the site of a former oil refinery in Central Europe. Lixea will turn a defunct polluting enterprise in a quiet corner of Europe into a green, sustainable centre of sustainable excellence providing secure well-paid employment for the locality and beyond.
"Where next is a good question," says Krisztina Kovacs-Schreiner, who has guided the company through recent tumultuous times that included the pandemic, political challenges to the sustainability agenda and global financial difficulties. "Lixea is seeking investment to help us build our demonstrator plant. We've identified a site that
was formerly used to refine oil, and there's a nice symmetry in acquiring it for use in the bioeconomy instead. With the demonstrator plant online, we can prove our approach works cost effectively at scale while saving thousands of tonnes of carbon emissions."
For Professor Hallett, who is still closely involved with Lixea as scientific adviser, it is both the end and the beginning of a journey. "I have built my academic career around ionic liquids and using them as an extraction solvent. Proving through Lixea that a process we observed in the lab more than fifteen years ago can work at scale in a commercial context is incredibly exciting. But there's much more still to come from ionic liquids."
Professor Sandro Macchietto, Director of Enterprise in the Department of Chemical Engineering, said: "Lixea's platform technology is succeeding commercially in an area littered with many failed attempts. It has demonstrated the ability to make sustainably, economically and at scale a huge variety of products currently produced from fossil feedstocks.
"Their story shows that taking a new high-tech process from lab to market is particularly challenging, taking time, capital and true entrepreneurial grit. To support the journey, we have given Lixea visibility and exposure to investors through our pioneering ChemEng Enterprise initiative. In turn, Lixea represents a great example and model for the long list of other exciting deep-tech companies that have recently spun out and the dozen in the pipeline from the department. Congratulations and best wishes to Krisztina and co-founders, they are moving the needle!"
