Unilever specialty chemicals at a glance

National Starch & Chemical: headquar­ters in Bridgewater, N.J.; 8,300 employ­ees worldwide. Sales in 1996: $3 billion. Three major divisions: industrial adhe-sives, resins and specialty chemicals, and specialty starches for food and in­dustrial uses.

Quest International: headquarters in Naarden, the Netherlands; 4,400 em­ployees worldwide. Sales in 1996: just under $1 billion. Two divisions: flavors and ingredients for foods—ranging from emulsifiers to enzymes—and food biotechnology, and fragrance com­pounds and ingredients for applications ranging from prestige perfumes to soaps and detergents.

Unichema International: headquarters in Gouda, the Netherlands; 1,600 em­ployees worldwide. Sales in 1996: $750 million. Specialty oleochemicals derived from natural oils and fats such as palm oil, coconut oil, and tallow; and nickel catalysts, developed from hydrogénation processes.

Crosfield: headquarters in Warrington, England; 1,300 employees worldwide. Sales in 1996: $400 million. Inorganic chemicals based on silica and alumina for applications such as silicates used for detergent builders and toothpaste fillers, processing aids for brewing, and catalysts for the petroleum and plastics industries.

S. Green of Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and coworkers [Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 90,373 0993)].

Blackburn points out that other ante­cedents of the new technique include the glycosidic suicide substrate inhibitor (trapping reagent) reported in 1990 by S. Halazy at Merrell Dow Research Institute in Strasbourg, France, and coworkers, as well as the antibody phage-display tech­nique developed in the early 1990s by Greg Winter's group at the Medical Re­search Council Centre for Protein Engi­neering in Cambridge, England, and inde­pendently by a Scripps team including molecular biology professor Carlos F. Barbas III, Lerner, and immunology pro­fessor Dennis Burton.

Janda, Wong, Lerner, and coworkers "have taken a little bit from these three elements and put them together very beautifully," says Blackburn. "I think the technique is going to work. I can tell you that we shall have a go at it. Any process that releases a suicide product will work, and there's a great spectrum of suicide reactions that can be used."

Stu Borman

Unilever wants out of chemical businesses Anglo-Dutch food and detergents compa­ny Unilever intends to sell its specialty chemicals businesses. These businesses ac­count for only 9% of the consumer prod­ucts giant's total corporate sales, but as a group, these specialty chemicals operations total enough sales to rank Unilever as the world's 37th largest chemical producer.

"These specialty chemicals businesses have developed significantly over the past two decades and are strong and profitable operations with leading global positions in their respective markets," says Niall FitzGerald, Unilever chairman. "This in­dustry is currently undergoing consider­able realignment, and a sale of our busi­nesses at this time would allow them to participate more effectively in the oppor­tunities that this realignment presents." Plus, FitzGerald explains, the sale will "en­able Unilever to concentrate resources on our consumer goods operations."

The four Unilever businesses involved are National Starch & Chemical, Quest In­ternational, Unichema International, and Crosfield. Combined sales of the four units amounted to about $5.1 billion in 1996.

However, there is a clear implication that Unilever's chemicals "empire" will

be thoroughly broken up. Given the dif­ferent markets the units sell to, industry analysts say it is highly likely that the company will sell off the chemical oper­ations unit by unit. Unilever should be able to realize between $8 billion and $97 billion, they predict.

Analysts, in fact, become quite excited putting together slates of potential buyers. For example, Switzerland's Roche—which just spent $1.1 billion to buy U.S.-based flavors and fragrance company Tastemak-er—might purchase the larger flavors and fragrance company, Quest International, to further boost its business in that sector. Roche has been under pressure to either sell its own flavors and fragrances business

Tackling global warming More than 2,000 economists have signed a statement declaring that the U.S. can pursue some policies to curtail green­house gas emissions without harming the economy.

The economists want to influence the policies the U.S. will pursue this Decem­ber during international negotiations in Kyoto, Japan, says Stephen DeCanio, pro­fessor of economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who organized the effort. In Kyoto, representatives of the world's nations will hammer out an agreement to address the threat of global warming.

At first glance, it appears that the economists' statement favors bold action to avert climate change. But, in reality, it is carefully crafted to encompass views ranging from those advocating drastic steps to reduce emissions levels in the

or do something with it, one analyst notes. "This would be a way to really boost its presence."

Among potential purchasers of Na­tional Starch, according to another ana­lyst, are large U.S.-based food processors such as Cargill. "These companies have seen pressure on their margins on starch, and the acquisition of National Starch would be an ideal opportunity for one of these companies to get involved with downstream, higher value-added starch-based products," the analyst says. If such a purchaser didn't want other products, like adhesives, those could probably be sold off reasonably easily.

Patricia Layman

von't hurt economy near term to those advocating only those steps that would be economically justifi­able even if there were no threat of cli­mate change.

The economists' statement is "disap­pointingly lacking in specific informa­tion," and, consequently, is "subject to misinterpretation," says Tom M. L. Wig-ley of the National Center for Atmospher­ic Research, Boulder, Colo., who has written extensively on the environmen­tal and economic impacts of various emission reduction scenarios.

The first of the statement's three para­graphs is clear and decisive. It endorses the conclusions of the 1996 United Na­tions Intergovernmental Panel on Cli­mate Change, citing the panel's major conclusion: "The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate." It says preventive

FEBRUARY 17, 1997 C&EN 9

n e w s of the w e e k %$'$/' -

Solow: follow "no regrets" policy

steps are needed to avert risks associated with climate change.

The second paragraph says that many policies to reduce greenhouse emissions have benefits that outweigh the costs, and could slow climate change without harming U.S. living standards. The third and final paragraph says the U.S. and other nations "can implement climate policies through market mechanisms, such as carbon taxes or the auction of emission permits."

International tradeable permits would make emission reductions cheaper by bringing the "powerful forces of the market to bear," says Nobel Laureate Kenneth J. Arrow, who helped craft the document. "We want to make sure the economic efficiency of reductions mea­sures is high," he explains.

Large increases in carbon dioxide emis­sions will come from developing countries like China and India, Arrow says, and a carbon tax or tradeable emissions permits would give them incentives to mitigate emissions. And DeCanio notes such taxes would be more politically acceptable if they were used to offset other taxes, such as taxes on capital.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert M. Solow, who also helped create the statement, says "no regrets" policies are an important way to reduce greenhouse emissions. These he defines as policies that a reasonable person "would want to pursue even if there were no greenhouse gas threat." Investing in more efficient lighting in commercial buildings when the payback period is short is an example he cites.

Apart from favoring carbon taxes and tradeable permits, the second and third paragraphs of the statement are extreme­

ly vague. They mention reducing emis­sions, but do not specify relative to what. And the term "total benefits" does not specify whether it applies only to finan­cial or also to environmental benefits.

"We're not favoring anything very dras­tic," says Dale W. Jorgenson, economics professor at Harvard University and a state­ment drafter. The statement is consistent with a rising pattern of emissions and ris­ing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. "There is no way to avoid that at a reasonable cost," he explains. Trying to stabilize greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere "would be very, very damaging to the world economy."

Arrow, on the other hand, believes that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, now at about 360 ppm, have to be stabilized somewhere between 600 and 700 ppm to avoid extreme changes in climate. This can be achieved without placing a large burden on the economy, he says.

Even though opinions differ widely among the statement signers, it repre­sents a first step in reaching consensus in the design of climate-change policies, DeCanio says. It "will be extremely valu­able for policymakers confronting the global climate-change issue."

Bette Hileman

Nucleophilic catalyst does kinetic resolution Chemists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology have invented a highly stereo­selective nucleophilic catalyst, the most selective known to date—other than an enzyme—for acylating racemic alcohols. The organometallic catalyst is stable to air and moisture, both as a solid and in solu­tions. And the catalyst can be quantitative­ly recovered \J. Am. Chem. Soc, 119,1492 (1997)].

Most good nucleophiles are planar amines like 4-dimethylaminopyridine, and it is hard to add asymmetry to such mole­cules to get good stereoselectivity. Gradu­ate student J. Craig Ruble, postdoctoral fel­low Hallie A. Latham, and organic chemis­try professor Gregory C. Fu attacked the problem by cobbling a cyclopentadiene ring onto the 4-dimethylaminopyridine moiety and making it an integral part of a chiral ferrocene analog.

The other portion of the ferrocene co­ordinated to the iron atom is pentaphenyl-cyclopentadiene. The MIT workers use this "supracyclopentadiene," as some oth­er researchers have dubbed it, to add ster-

ic bulk to the structure. This bulk enhanc­es the stereoselectivity. They separate the enantiomers of the catalytic ferrocene an­alog by chiral high-performance liquid chromatography.

Commenting on the MIT work, organ­ic chemistry professor Eric N. Jacobsen of Harvard University says, "Professor Fu has devised a very nice nucleophilic cat­alyst and demonstrated its effectiveness in resolution of arylcarbinols. The cata­lyst constitutes a new class, and so it is a very promising approach."

A good example of the catalyst at work is the selective acetylation of racemic a-phenethyl alcohol by acetic anhydride at room temperature. Because one enan-tiomer of the alcohol reacts faster than the other, the result is a kinetic resolution that leaves the unreacted alcohol in high enan­tiomeric excess. Running the reaction 62% to completion results in 95% enantiomeric excess of unreacted alcohol. Enantiomeric excesses above 90% have been obtained for a range of substituted arylethanols and cinnamyl alcohols.

In other recent work, the MIT re­searchers showed that symmetric forms of their metallocene catalysts mediate reac­tion of aldehydes with silyl cyanides to form cyanohydrins with silyloxy pro­tecting groups \J. Org. Chem., 61, 7230 (1996)]. For example, dodecanal reacts with triethylsilyl cyanide to give 2-trisi-lyloxytridecanonitrile.

Novel nucleophilic catalyst. . .

(CH3)2N

*N Fe

6 n 5

Η 5 ^ 6 " ^ ^ | ^ ^ 6 Η 5

CcHi 6n5

. . . mediates kinetic resolution of alcohols

H 5 C 6

OH

A. CH3

Ο II

OCCH3

H5C6 CH3

(CH3CO)20 1

(-)-Catalyst

OH

H5C6 CH3

95% enantiomeric excess at 62%

conversion

1 0 FEBRUARY 17, 1997 C&EN