Bioprocess intensification: Cases that (don't) work

Development of affordable and low carbon biobased manufacturing depends critically on strategies that reduce cost and emission profiles. This paper indicates that efforts around the reduction of capital costs by intensification of process equipment need to be carefully weighed against the inherently fast increasing financial and climate costs...

Techno-economic assessment of heterotrophic microalgae biodiesel production integrated with a sugarcane bio-refinery

The use of diesel fuel in crop and transportation operations is responsible for one third of the carbon emissions in sugarcane biorefineries. A possible solution is to replace it with biodiesel from lipids, directly produced from sugarcane by highly productive heterotrophic microalgae. In this study a heterotrophic microalgae biodiesel plant,...

Techno-economic assessment of the use of solvents in the scale-up of microbial sesquiterpene production for fuels and fine chemicals

Sesquiterpenes are a group of versatile, 15-carbon molecules with applications ranging from fuels to fine chemicals and pharmaceuticals. When produced by microbial fermentation at laboratory scale, solvents are often employed for reducing product evaporation and enhancing recovery. However, it is not clear whether this approach constitutes a...

Integrated 1st and 2nd generation sugarcane bio-refinery for jet fuel production in Brazil: Techno-economic and greenhouse gas emissions assessment

This study presents a techno-economic analysis and an environmental assessment, of the whole production chain (biomass production, sugar extraction, biomass pretreatment, sugars fermentation, and products recovery and purification), of a fully autarkic sugarcane-based biorefinery for biojet fuel production. All scenarios considered correspond...

Vapour permeation for ethanol recovery from fermentation off–gas

In ethanol fermentations, about 2% of the ethanol leaves the fermenter with the off–gas. Conventionally, this is recovered by absorption in water. As alternative, vapour permeation was investigated conceptually for ethanol recovery from fermentation off–gas. A preliminary techno–economic evaluation of this system using hydrophobic membrane...