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Integrated butanol recovery for an advanced biofuel: current state and prospects

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Abstract

Butanol has recently gained increasing interest due to escalating prices in petroleum fuels and concerns on the energy crisis. However, the butanol production cost with conventional acetone–butanol–ethanol fermentation by Clostridium spp. was higher than that of petrochemical processes due to the low butanol titer, yield, and productivity in bioprocesses. In particular, a low butanol titer usually leads to an extremely high recovery cost. Conventional biobutanol recovery by distillation is an energy-intensive process, which has largely restricted the economic production of biobutanol. This article thus reviews the latest studies on butanol recovery techniques including gas stripping, liquid–liquid extraction, adsorption, and membrane-based techniques, which can be used for in situ recovery of inhibitory products to enhance butanol production. The productivity of the fermentation system is improved efficiently using the in situ recovery technology; however, the recovered butanol titer remains low due to the limitations from each one of these recovery technologies, especially when the feed butanol concentration is lower than 1 % (w/v). Therefore, several innovative multi-stage hybrid processes have been proposed and are discussed in this review. These hybrid processes including two-stage gas stripping and multi-stage pervaporation have high butanol selectivity, considerably higher energy and production efficiency, and should outperform the conventional processes using single separation step or method. The development of these new integrated processes will give a momentum for the sustainable production of industrial biobutanol.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) with grant numbers of 21306020 and 21376044, the Specialized Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education of China (20130041120027), the Scientific Research Fund of Liaoning Provincial Education Department (L2013022), China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2013M530904), the Open Research Fund from Biofuels Key Laboratory of Chinese Academy of Sciences in Qingdao Institute of Bioenergy and Bioprocess Technology (CASKLB201303), and the Scientific Research Foundation for the Returned Overseas Chinese Scholars of State Education Ministry.

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  1. School of Life Science and Biotechnology, Dalian University of Technology, No. 2 Linggong Road, Dalian, Liaoning, 116024, China

    Chuang Xue, Li-Jie Chen, Feng-Wu Bai & Shang-Tian Yang

  2. Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, 43210, USA

    Jing-Bo Zhao, Shang-Tian Yang & Jian-Xin Sun

  3. Microbial and Cell Culture Development, GlaxoSmithKline, 709 Swedeland Road, King of Prussia, PA, 19406, USA

    Jian-Xin Sun

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  1. Chuang Xue
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  2. Jing-Bo Zhao
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  3. Li-Jie Chen
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  4. Feng-Wu Bai
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  5. Shang-Tian Yang
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Correspondence to Chuang Xue or Jian-Xin Sun.

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The authors Chuang Xue and Jing-Bo Zhao made equal contributions.

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Xue, C., Zhao, JB., Chen, LJ. et al. Integrated butanol recovery for an advanced biofuel: current state and prospects. Appl Microbiol Biotechnol 98, 3463–3474 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00253-014-5561-6

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