Origin Materials celebrates opening of Sarnia bio-chemical plant

The path to Sarnia’s newest biochemical plant is quite an Origin story.

Back in 2008, John Bissell and a few other chemical engineering students at the University of California, Davis, formed a company and developed technology to turn carbon from wood biomass, like sawdust, into building block chemicals with a low carbon footprint.

Bissell was in Sarnia July 19 to celebrate the opening of the company’s first commercial production site in an industrial park at Arlanxeo in Sarnia.

Origin Materials’ first commercial site, completed this year, is poised to start making chloromethyl furfural (CMF), a chemical used to make plastic, and hydrothermal carbon (HTC), used for carbon black in making tires.

“It’s pretty amazing,” Bissell, Origin’s co-chief executive, said of seeing the plant some 15 years after the company began.

“In some ways, it’s sort of hard to come to grips with it emotionally,” he said. “I think sometimes these things take a little time to settle in.”

The $130-million plant received a $23-million contribution from Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, and assistance from Bioindustrial Innovation Canada, a federally-funded Sarnia agency helping emerging biochemical companies.

The agency announced in 2017 it had invested in California-based Origin, which would build a commercial-scale demonstration plant in Sarnia.

Building that first facility in Canada “is not how we expected that to go” early in the company’s development, “but we’re happy that it did,” Bissell said.

Construction took time and was affected by the pandemic and supply chain shortages, but Origin announced in March the plant was mechanically completed.

“Like everybody, we had just a ton of challenges associated with construction during the pandemic and, frankly, the supply chain challenges didn’t really stop,” he said.

“I think we managed quite ably,” but the impact “wasn’t trivial,” Bissell said.

He said the company has had a good experience in Sarnia.

“The highly skilled community is fantastic. Knowing that you have the ability to draw on . . . talented tradesmen, construction folks, engineers, operators is just spectacular.”

Bissell said he believes building the first plant would have been a lot “more challenging . . . if we hadn’t had that highly-skilled labor pool to draw from.”

The company held a ribbon-cutting with local officials July 19 to celebrate the new plant.

“It takes a village for projects like this, and I think we had a lot of the village represented, which is nice,” Bissell said.

About 30 employees are working at the Sarnia site, which is still in startup mode, he said. “We’re not. . . making product yet, but we’re really close.”

Origin Materials still has a pilot facility running at the Western Sarnia-Lambton Research Park off Modeland Road.

He added, “Knowing the material that we have wanted to have at scale for so long is finally going to be available, that’s a big deal.”

The Sarnia plant, dubbed “Origin 1,” will make chemicals customers can use to qualify in their production systems, and help develop other products.

“CMF and HTC. . . haven’t really been available before in any reasonable quantities,” Bissell said. “Getting us truck and railcar quantities of those materials to develop other products. . . that’s a big deal.

The Sarnia operation also will give Origin knowledge it can use at future production site, including a large plant the company has announced for Louisiana.

“It lets us get our feet under us from the manufacturing perspective,” Bissell said. “We have a lot of expert folks in manufacturing on the team, but they’re all coming from different places.”

The Sarnia site is where they can “consolidate the way we want to run a manufacturing organization,” Bissell said. “It’s a really good proving ground for us.”

Bissell said the Sarnia plant is “one big step forward but it’s not the end of the journey, by a long shot.”