Defossilization Needs to Be Critical Target in a Sustainability Program

Hours before sunrise on Thursday, March 19, I watched the price of crude-oil futures bounce like a ball: US$96.81, 96.78, 96.82, 96.85—prices only surpassed in the past five years in 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine. During the year before the United States bombed Iran on February 28, the price per barrel of crude oil still bounced around, but at roughly $65. Within about a week after the first bombs fell on Iran, crude-oil futures increased by nearly 50%. As a result, in addition to targeting miliary sites and uranium-enrichment, the military strikes have impacted bioprocessing operations worldwide. Here’s how.

A few years ago, Jan Backmann, PhD, a senior leader in sustainability at F. Hoffmann-La Roche, and two colleagues—one from the Ecoinvent Association, a not-for-profit environmental-data organization in Switzerland, and another from Genetech—reported: “Internal analysis within F. Hoffmann-La Roche reveals that up to 60% of bioprocess raw materials, including chemicals used for sanitization and storage, may be of fossil origin.”

For a biologic produced with fermentation, though, “most of the fossil-derived impact comes from energy usage,” according to Backmann and his colleagues. By the way, the manufacturing of many biologics still depends on some form of fermentation. In fact, Sheng Zhang, PhD, vice president of biologics development and manufacturing at WuXi Biologics, noted recently that “microbial fermentation is experiencing a revival.”

Granted, the bioprocessing industry hopes to rely less on petroleum. The very title of Backmann and team’s article—“Defossilization of pharmaceutical manufacturing”—emphasizes this objective, and they stated: “Pharmaceutical companies will need to pursue the defossilization as part of their sustainability ambitions….” Moreover, some suppliers already offer products to support those ambitions. As one example, Thermo Fisher Scientific developed various products, including single-use bioprocess containers, that replace fossil-fuel feedstocks with biobased ones. Until more sustainable methods transform bioprocessing, though, the drug-bioprocessing industry will need to find a way to accommodate the increase in petroleum prices.

And those prices are not likely to quickly return to previous levels. On March 22, an article about energy markets from The Economist noted: “Even if Donald Trump and Iran reached a deal to stop fighting tomorrow, it would … be another four months before markets regained some semblance of normality.”

On Monday, March 23, the crude-oil price hovered around $99, but overnight it had briefly surpassed $100, crossing that cost level for the first time since the early 2020s. As I pondered that price, I realized that the reach of war goes farther than a bomb’s kill zone and that lives can be lost in many indirect ways, maybe even by increasing the already high cost of biotherapeutics.

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