Advances in Bioenergy

6. Process Development for Butanol Fermentation

The industrial production of biobutanol via classic ABE fermentation requires not only strain engineering but also process engineering to overcome the main limitations in this process, including butanol toxicity, low productivity, unsatisfactory yield, etc.

6.1. In Situ Product Removal

In the fermentation, it is hard for most of the butanol-producing strains to tolerate a butanol concentration higher than 15 g/L and thus the final butanol titre is usually low (Ishii et al., 1985; Taya et al., 1985). As a result, the recovery of butanol by traditional distillation is generally economically infeasible because of high energy consumption. Concurrently, various in situ product removal/recovery strategies ...