Kemvera (formerly New Iridium)

What makes acetic acid central to global manufacturing supply chains?

In industrial chemistry, scale drives outcomes. Incremental improvements in small-volume products may demonstrate technical ingenuity, but they rarely alter supply chains or emissions trajectories in meaningful ways.

That is where Kemvera, formerly New Iridium, has chosen a more demanding path.

Rather than entering the bio-based chemicals market through specialty niches, the company is targeting one of the most widely used organic chemicals in the world: acetic acid, a quiet workhorse of modern manufacturing.

Produced globally at roughly twenty million metric tons per year, acetic acid sits at the cornerstone of the acetyl value chain, supplying intermediates for plastics, coatings, adhesives, solvents, textiles, and consumer products. Its derivatives appear in materials as ordinary as house paint and as ubiquitous as soles and cushioning for casual footwear. Because of this reach, acetic acid represents both a challenge and an opportunity for decarbonization. Any meaningful shift in how it is produced would ripple across multiple industries.

Kemvera was formed around the conviction that sustainability in chemicals must begin with products that already matter at scale. The company has positioned itself to focus on commercializing a proprietary thermocatalytic process that converts bioethanol into bio-based acetic acid and ethyl acetate.

“The goal is not to create a green alternative confined to premium markets, but to displace fossil-derived supply with a renewable, domestically sourced equivalent that performs identically in downstream applications,” says Chern-Hooi Lim, founder and CEO.

The One-Step Oxidation Process

How does Kemvera convert surplus bioethanol into acetic acid efficiently?

The starting point for Kemvera’s process is bioethanol, a cost-advantaged feedstock produced in the U.S. in abundance. Corn-derived ethanol has long been used primarily for fuel, blended into gasoline to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and meet regulatory mandates. Yet domestic production consistently exceeds consumption, creating a structural surplus that must be exported or curtailed.

This imbalance has economic consequences for ethanol producers and farmers alike. Kemvera’s approach reframes ethanol not as a fuel to be burned, but as a chemical building block capable of supporting higher-value manufacturing.

Redirecting ethanol into chemicals is not a new idea, but it has proven difficult to execute at industrial scale. Traditional routes for converting ethanol into acetic acid often rely on fermentation processes that lack efficiency and produce only dilute concentrations of product resulting in higher costs. These drawbacks have historically made fossil-based methanol carbonylation the dominant production method, accounting for more than ninety percent of global acetic acid supply. Any alternative must compete not only on environmental merit, but also on cost, yield, and reliability.

Kemvera’s technology is based on a one-step oxidation process that converts bioethanol directly into acetic acid and ethyl acetate. In chemical manufacturing, simplicity carries economic weight. This approach reduces capital cost, energy demand, and yield loss.

“By consolidating conversion into a single reactor, we aim to reduce complexity while improving performance metrics that matter for plant operations and cost efficiency,” says Brent Cutcliffe, co-founder and COO.

Building a Renewable Acetic Acid Supply Chain

What performance metrics determine commercial viability for renewable acetic acid?

Kemvera’s process simultaneously achieves high selectivity and high conversion, a combination that has eluded prior attempts at ethanol oxidation. Selectivity determines how much of the feedstock becomes the intended product rather than waste. Conversion measures how fully the feedstock reacts.

The company reports selectivity exceeding ninety-five percent and first-pass conversion of at least ninety percent with the remainder recycled for full conversion, alongside space-time yields far higher than fermentation-based approaches. In practical terms, this means more product from less equipment, smaller reactors, and lower capital costs.

These efficiencies are critical to Kemvera’s commercial thesis. Bio-based chemicals can face headwinds from high green premiums, the price differential between renewable products and their fossil-derived counterparts. Company leadership has been explicit in rejecting that model.

“Our strategy depends on producing bio-based acetic acid and ethyl acetate that are cost-competitive with incumbent materials, allowing customers to adopt them without changing formulations or absorbing higher costs,” says Lim.

The implications extend beyond emissions accounting. Acetic acid feeds directly into vinyl acetate monomer, which in turn enables polymer materials such as ethylene vinyl acetate. EVA is a staple in footwear manufacturing, forming the lightweight foam used in soles and cushioning. Because these materials are used heavily by consumer brands, they represent an early opportunity for bio-based inputs to become visible to end users. A renewable acetic acid supply chain could therefore influence not only industrial procurement, but also brand sustainability narratives.

Preparing for Full-Scale Deployment

Kemvera’s development pathway reflects the realities of scaling chemical processes. The company recently commissioned a twenty-metric-ton-per-year pilot reactor and demonstrated continuous operation to validate process stability and robustness.

That pilot informs the already designed five-hundred-metric-ton-per-year pre-commercial demonstration reactor, which will in turn serve as the basis for scaling to a fifty-thousand-metric-ton-per-year commercial plant. Each step increases capacity by roughly an order of magnitude, a deliberate approach intended to manage technical and safety risk.

Alongside reactor development, Kemvera has completed the first phase of its front-end engineering design for the commercial facility. This work translates laboratory and pilot data into engineering specifications, providing a roadmap for construction and operation.

The company plans to continue advancing through subsequent engineering phases as it prepares for full-scale deployment with engineering and production partners.

Toward Commercialization

Internally, Kemvera has concentrated its expertise on the critical reaction elements including catalyst and reactor design, which it views as the irreducible core of its innovation. These elements determine conversion efficiency, selectivity, and throughput.

Downstream aspects of the process after the reaction, such as purification and separation, rely on established chemical engineering principles and are being scaled with external engineering support. This division of development responsibilities allows Kemvera to focus its resources on what differentiates its platform while leveraging proven industrial capabilities where appropriate.

The company’s recent rebranding from New Iridium to Kemvera signals a shift from technology development toward commercialization. The new name reflects an emphasis on growth, resilience, and permanence, qualities associated with industrial infrastructure rather than laboratory experimentation. It also aligns with the company’s intent to anchor production in domestic agricultural feedstocks and strengthen U.S. manufacturing capacity.

Integrating Agricultural Production with Industrial Chemistry

From the perspective of its founders, the broader objective is to normalize bio-based chemicals within mainstream supply chains.

As Lim states, “We are not interested in creating a boutique green product that lives at the margins of the market. The objective is to take American ethanol and convert it into everyday materials that match fossil-based performance and economics, while reducing reliance on imported and petrochemical feedstocks.”

That ambition places Kemvera within a larger shift underway in the chemical sector. Facing regulatory pressures, manufacturers are simultaneously pursuing, decarbonization targets and supply chain resilience thus, interest in domestically sourced, renewable inputs is growing. The U.S. bio-based chemicals market is projected to expand rapidly over the coming decade, driven by demand for materials that combine performance with lower lifecycle emissions.

Kemvera’s approach aligns with this trend by integrating agricultural production with industrial chemistry, creating a vertically connected and resilient value chain from Midwest cornfields to industrial end users.

Accelerating Potential Market Penetration

How could drop-in compatibility accelerate adoption across existing manufacturing infrastructure?

Near-term applications for Kemvera’s products include footwear, coatings, disinfectants, and solvents, with broader adoption expected as capacity scales. Because the company’s materials are designed as drop-in replacements, they can be incorporated into existing manufacturing infrastructure with minimal requalification or reformulation. This compatibility reduces barriers to adoption and accelerates potential market penetration.

Kemvera’s progress illustrates both the promise and the discipline required to commercialize bio-based chemistry at scale. By choosing a high-volume product and committing to cost parity with fossil-based incumbents, the company is targeting significantly larger markets and emissions impact than many early-stage chemical ventures. Success will depend not only on technical performance, but also on execution, partnerships, and timing.

If the company succeeds, its impact will be measured less by novelty than by absence: fewer fossil inputs in everyday materials, fewer emissions embedded in ordinary goods, and a chemical supply chain that is increasingly domestic, renewable and resilient.

In an industry where change is often incremental, Kemvera is attempting something more structural, applying modern catalysis and engineering to one of the most established molecules in the chemical economy.