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Biobutanol
Published in Debabrata Das, Jhansi L. Varanasi, Fundamentals of Biofuel Production Processes, 2019
Debabrata Das, Jhansi L. Varanasi
The rising environmental concerns over the use of fossil fuels have kindled the search for alternate fuel sources. Butanol has been considered an attractive substitute due to its inherent advantages such as high calorific value and non-corrosive nature. Biochemical production of butanol is more efficient and inexpensive compared to chemical synthesis of butanol. However, the major challenge of ABE fermentation is the cost of the feedstock and the production of toxic by-products that limit the up-scaling of the process. By using inexpensive feedstocks such as lignocellulosics and syngas in place of tradition sugar- and starch-based feedstock and by developing robust industrial strains capable of producing and tolerating high titers of butanol, the economic feasibility of ABE process can be achieved. With the recent advances in synthetic biology applications and process engineering tools along with the development of commercial biobutanol plants, the realization of biobutanol production as a sustainable transportation fuel can be foreseen in the future.
Recent Advances in Consolidated Bioprocessing for Microbe-Assisted Biofuel Production
Published in Sonil Nanda, Prakash Kumar Sarangi, Dai-Viet N. Vo, Fuel Processing and Energy Utilization, 2019
Prakash Kumar Sarangi, Sonil Nanda
The acetone-butanol-ethanol (ABE) fermentation is carried out using anaerobic bacterium such as Clostridium acetobutylicum or Clostridium beijerinckii in a biphasic process involving acidogenesis and solventogenesis. Although the acidogenic phase involves the production of acids (e.g., acetic acid and butyric acid), the solventogenic phase is related to the accumulation of solvents (e.g., acetone, butanol, and ethanol). The ABE-producing bacteria can utilize both starchy and lignocellulosic substrates. However, the later must be hydrolyzed using a suitable pretreatment method (i.e., dilute acid and enzymatic hydrolysis). Different biomass such as wheat straw (Nanda et al. 2014a), rice straw (Gottumukkala et al. 2014), barley straw (Qureshi et al. 2010a), corn stover (Parekh et al. 1988; Qureshi et al. 2010b), corncobs and fibers (Guo et al. 2013), palm kernel cake (Shukor et al. 2014), cassava starch (Li et al. 2014a, 2014b), pinewood (Nanda et al. 2014a), timothy grass (Nanda et al. 2014a), switch grass (Qureshi et al. 2010b), and sago pith (Linggang et al. 2013) have been used as substrates for ABE fermentation.
Liquid–Liquid Equilibria: Experiments, Correlation and Prediction
Published in Anand Bharti, Debashis Kundu, Dharamashi Rabari, Tamal Banerjee, Phase Equilibria in Ionic Liquid Facilitated Liquid–Liquid Extractions, 2017
Anand Bharti, Debashis Kundu, Dharamashi Rabari, Tamal Banerjee
Bio-butanol is typically produced via acetone–butanol–ethanol (ABE) fermentation of renewable feedstock using various strains of Clostridium acetobutylicum (Fischer, Klein-Marcuschamer, & Stephanopoulos, 2008) or Clostridium beijerinckii (Ha, Mai, & Koo, 2010) in anaerobic conditions resulting in the production of butanol, acetone and ethanol in a proportion of 6:3:1. Bio-butanol obtained via the ABE fermentation process is now considered as a potential biofuel as it has many advantages over other fermentation-derived fuels including ethanol. High concentration of butanol (>10 g/L) inhibits microbial cell growth during fermentation (Garcia-Chavez, Garsia, Schuur, & de Haan, 2012); however, its removal reduces the effect of product inhibition and enables the conversion of the concentrated feed leading to a high productivity. Accordingly, in situ recovery of butanol from fermentation broth has gained considerable attention. Several techniques such as stripping, adsorption, liquid–liquid extraction, pervaporation and membrane solvent extraction have been investigated for removing butanol from a fermentation broth. Among these methods, liquid–liquid extraction has shown advantages over the others (Ha et al., 2010). Liquid–liquid extraction can be performed with high selectivity and is possible to carry out inside a fermenter. Several studies have been done for the extraction of alcohols from aqueous solutions using ILs (Chapeaux, Simoni, Ronan, Stadtherr, & Brennecke, 2008; Garcia-Chavez et al., 2012; Ha et al., 2010; Simoni, Chapeaux, Brennecke, & Stadtherr, 2010).
Influence of acetic and butyric acid and gas release modes on immobilized Clostridium acetobutylicum (DSMZ 792) in repeated batch experiments
Published in Biofuels, 2022
Ullrich Heinz Stein, M. Abbasi-Hosseini, G. Bochmann, W. Fuchs
Depletion of fossil fuels and therefore the need to find substitutes for oil-based products are important scientific questions. A great deal of research has been done in the field of sustainable production, which is an established but still growing economy. Butanol is one of the major oil-based products and is employed, for example, as a chemical building block in many applications such as surface coatings, paints, bio-based polymers, plastics and more [1]. Its favorable chemical and physical properties (e.g. lower vapor pressure, higher energy content, less hygroscopic, etc.) make butanol, in comparison to ethanol, better suited for blending with gasoline; in fact, butanol can even completely replace ethanol. Furthermore, it can be distributed over the existing pipeline infrastructure and is less corrosive than ethanol [2, 3]. Usually derived from fossil fuels, butanol can also be produced by microbial conversion with clostridial strains through acetone–butanol–ethanol (ABE) fermentation. Considerable research has been done on microbial ABE fermentation, and interest has arisen to bypass energy usage and buildup of greenhouse gases through fossil-based processes. A wide range of strategies have been proposed to achieve the economic feasibility of microbial butanol, which are described in detail by Maiti et al. [4]. Despite this scientific progress, substantial research must be conducted to match up with the petrol-based industry from an economic point of view.
Influence of gas-release strategies on the production of biohydrogen and biobutanol in ABE fermentation
Published in Biofuels, 2022
Ullrich Heinz Stein, M. Abbasi-Hosseini, J. Kain, W. Fuchs, G. Bochmann
ABE fermentation is performed by Clostridia which produce acetone, butanol and ethanol in the ratio of 3:6:1, most commonly. Although significant research has been conducted on the microbial generation of these products, several complications still arise. The main problem associated with butanol production is its low final titer due to its toxicity.5 Additionally, clostridial ABE fermentations undergo a biphasic fermentation profile with its different cultivating conditions, which leads to problems in the fermentation process itself. During the first stage (acidogenesis, pH ∼6.8) the microorganisms produce volatile fatty acids (VFAs, mainly butyric and acetic acid) concomitant with the production of hydrogen-rich gas. The released acids lower the pH and eventually induce the second stage (solventogenesis, pH ∼4.5–5.5), which is characterized by the reutilization of the acids to produce ABE and spore formation moving forward.
Chemicals from lignocellulosic biomass: A critical comparison between biochemical, microwave and thermochemical conversion methods
Published in Critical Reviews in Environmental Science and Technology, 2021
Iris K. M. Yu, Huihui Chen, Felix Abeln, Hadiza Auta, Jiajun Fan, Vitaly L. Budarin, James H. Clark, Sophie Parsons, Christopher J. Chuck, Shicheng Zhang, Gang Luo, Daniel C.W Tsang
Butanol is also produced industrially from biomass and is generally sold in the commodity chemical market rather than as a biofuel. Renewable n-butanol is globally produced through acetone-butanol-ethanol (ABE) fermentation originally using Clostridium acetobutylicum, which has been operated on industrial scale for over 100 years (Sauer, 2016). After being outcompeted by its synthetic equivalent in the 1950s, nowadays, most efforts toward commercial ABE fermentation take place in China (Green, 2011). To produce high-quality n-butanol with Clostridium strains, Green Biologics purchased an ethanol plant (Little Falls, USA) in 2014 and retrofitted it. In additional to Clostridium spp., Saccharomyces cerevisiae is frequently modified to produce n- and iso-butanol. For example, both Gevo (Luverne, USA, 5,000 tonnes capacity, 2016) and Butamax (Scandia, USA), a joint venture of BP and DuPont, produce isobutanol at the industrial scale. Both companies retrofitted existing ethanol plants, in response to market saturation in the ethanol market. Producing butanol from lignocellulosic hydrolysates is more challenging due to the lack of substrate flexibility and low inhibitor tolerance of strains (Amiri & Karimi, 2018). Consolidated bioprocessing, where the enzymes for substrate hydrolysis and the fermentation are completed in one reactor, is being developed and small titers of butanol have been produced on cellulose and xylans with recombinant bacteria and mixed cultures. Despite promising results, this work has yet to be commercialized, and titers would need to be improved substantially for an economic process (Jiang et al., 2019).