High customer benefit thanks to expertise with a precise fit

Saltigo’s presence at Chemspec Europe this year will focus on the comprehensive expertise in exclusive synthesis and fine and specialty chemicals that the subsidiary of specialty chemicals group LANXESS offers its customers. The 37th International Trade Fair for Fine and Specialty Chemicals will take place on June 19 and 20, 2024, in the North Rhine-Westphalian state capital of Düsseldorf.

“Saltigo is offering a network of highly modern and flexible plants, facilities and laboratories at the Chempark sites in Leverkusen and Dormagen. What also sets us apart is our many decades of experience, our constantly growing expertise and the motivation of our employees. This has long been appreciated by companies in the agrochemical, pharmaceutical and fine chemicals industries. However, customers from many other industries also benefit from our comprehensive technological expertise, flexibility and highly efficient project management,” explains Michael Schaefer, Managing Director of Saltigo GmbH since February 2024.

This applies to exclusive synthesis, the core business of the Leverkusen-based company, but also to a wide range of fine and specialty chemicals, including the reliable insect repellent Saltidin. Schaefer believes that Saltigo is well positioned for the future within the LANXESS Group – backward integrated in terms of energy, many services and numerous raw materials and incorporated in an efficient logistics network in the heart of Europe.

Short routes to the market

“Major customers from the agrochemical or pharmaceutical industry often come to us with a ‘technical package’ that already contains a lot of detailed information and specifications for production. However, this is by no means the case for all of our projects,” explains Dr. Joerg Mohr, Head of Process Development & Analytics at Saltigo. Sometimes, says Mohr, a project starts with a laboratory specification on a milligram scale or even just a structural formula on a sheet of paper. He expects the number of such projects to increase in the future if more inquiries are received from user industries outside the agrochemical and pharmaceutical sectors. For example, more and more chemical products are needed in the electrical and electronics industry – e.g. for electrolysis and fuel cells or rechargeable accumulators.

Saltigo’s task is then to design a reliable, scalable and cost-efficient synthesis pathway in order to supply the customer with the required quantity of the desired product in the shortest possible time. This effort is worthwhile if, for example, a laboratory specification for a metathesis product becomes a series of productions on a 12 m³ scale over the course of a few years, as happened with a project in the biochemical field. “An additional requirement is the flexible handling of dynamically developing volume requirements. In return, we consider upscaling from the outset and can therefore often dispense with piloting as an intermediate step to large-scale production. This saves costs and time,” emphasizes Mohr.

With its technical laboratories, Saltigo also has facilities in which specialist expertise is constantly growing and keeping pace with the latest state of the art. “In the technical laboratories, processes are developed, improved and elaborated on a larger scale for the production plants. We also provide our customers with sample quantities in the kilogram range on request,” explains Dr. Darius Paul Kranz, head of the technical laboratories. In addition to registration, the reproducibility of procedures can be confirmed in the laboratories (“five typical batches”). Analytical procedures and methods for process monitoring and quality assurance are also developed and tested there. Other focal points are high-pressure reactions in autoclaves of various sizes from 30 ml to 20 l and reactions in either partially or even fully automated mini plants.

Net Zero Custom Manufacturing on trend

Climate change and its consequences pose new challenges, including for the manufacturing industry. One of them is a clearly increasing demand for products with net-zero emissions. Those substances are targeted to generate at least 90 percent less climate-damaging emissions during their manufacturing along the entire value chain than through conventional production. The availability and cost of sustainably produced raw materials and energy are crucial additional constraints in such production processes. “Saltigo has recently developed concepts for such net-zero custom manufacturing. Those will allow us to produce fine and specialty chemicals in a much more climate-friendly way in the future,” explains Dr. Christoph Schaffrath, Head of Marketing & Sales at Saltigo, and continues: “The number of such customer inquiries is increasing and we are convinced that this could become a vital part of our business in the future. There is more to it than just retrieving the carbon footprint of raw materials from a database. Net-zero projects require a lot of experience in chemistry and process technology, project management and procurement – and that is what we offer at Saltigo.”

Corresponding products are initially and primarily suitable for customers who operate close to consumers and for whom sustainability has become an important competitive advantage and a sales argument. This applies for the food industry, for example. However, this trend is also increasingly affecting other, non-consumer companies who are aiming to achieve their sustainability goals in this way.

Detailed information about the comprehensive range of services offered by Saltigo can be found online at https://saltigo.com/. LANXESS provides information about the Group’s climate protection activities online at https://lanxess.com/en/Sustainability/Material-Topics/Climate-Protection-and-Energy-Efficiency.