When you look at a manufactured product, you probably don’t think much about the chemicals that went into making it. However, as Doug Friedman, CEO of the bio-industrial manufacturing nonprofit BioMADE, explained in a recent episode of the Manufacturing Executive Podcast, those hidden chemical inputs are crucial to understand.
“Every manufacturer at some level must care about the global chemical supply chain,” Friedman said. “If you take enough steps back in your supply chain, you will hit the global chemical supply chain. There is no avoiding it.”
That’s because even highly complex products like electronics and vehicles are ultimately made from chemicals, supplied by a vast, interconnected web of producers and markets. Today, those chemicals overwhelmingly come from petroleum – and that overreliance on oil carries serious risks.
Friedman pointed to the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic when demand for protective equipment like Tyvek suits skyrocketed. Manufacturers couldn’t keep up, but not for lack of trying. The bottleneck was further down the supply chain.
“All of these chemical byproducts started to see a reduction in supply, even though the demand for these Tyvek suits was through the roof,” he explained. Because petroleum refineries are optimized to produce transportation fuels first and chemicals second, the crash in fuel consumption rippled through to a shortage of key chemical feedstocks.
It was a stark example of what Friedman calls the “disconnect” between petroleum-based supply and chemical demand. “The supply and demand for certain commodity and speciality chemicals are not necessarily coupled,” he said.
So what’s the solution? For Friedman and his colleagues at BioMADE, it’s bio-manufacturing – harnessing microbial processes to produce chemicals from agricultural inputs like corn and sugar. It’s a way of decoupling chemical production from the fuel markets and their volatility.
In bio-manufacturing, we’re able to really couple supply and demand. We’re able to manufacture the product we want to go into the supply chain we want.
Getting to the industrial scale won’t be easy. It means engineering microbes to produce massive volumes, building out infrastructure for fermentation, and driving costs down far enough to compete with the entrenched petroleum industry. But powerful forces are aligning to drive bio-manufacturing forward.
“Every estimate shows the amount of petroleum fuel the globe is consuming is going down,” Friedman said. “If the energy markets are the thing that is pushing fuel consumption and fuel production down, we will be making less chemicals than we are today. It’s going to happen. It is happening already.”
At the same time, global demand for chemicals keeps rising. Bio-manufacturing will need to fill that growing gap – and the decisions we make today to accelerate the industry will shape the economy for decades to come.
Friedman also highlighted the urgent national security implications of America’s chemical supply chains. The defense industrial base relies on the same petroleum-derived chemical inputs as commercial manufacturers – inputs that often originate in geopolitical rivals like Russia and China.
Developing a strong domestic bio-manufacturing sector, he argued, will be crucial to securing those supply chains and maintaining the U.S. military’s technological edge. That imperative is a key part of BioMADE’s mission.
So what does all this mean for manufacturers? Friedman challenged company leaders to take a hard look at their supply chains and dependencies.
“Figure out how many steps removed from this conversation is your business, your most important product,” he urged. “How many steps away from the global chemical supply chain?”
That knowledge, he hopes, will spur manufacturers to engage more actively in the policy discussions shaping the future of U.S. chemical production. If one thing is clear, it’s that no manufacturer can afford to ignore the hidden but crucial role of chemicals in the global economy.
