Retooled Approach To Bio-based Butanol Production

Biobutanol, a clean-burning alternative to gasoline can be produced in large scale at high efficiency and low-cost. This is due to the efforts made by a US Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service chemical engineer Nasib Quresi, when he developed a procedure combining three to four steps in the biobutanol production process. Normally, the four preparatory steps: pretreatment, hydrolysis, fermentation and recovery are carried out separately and sequentially. With Quresi’s technique, the enzymes and the bacteria are allowed to carry out their respective tasks simultaneously and the biobutanol is harvested as it is produced. The biobutanol productivity increased two-fold above the traditional glucose-based fermentation.

Current improvements in the technology termed as “fed-batch–feeding" showed much higher biobutanol production.

For details see the press release at http://www.ars.usda.gov/News/docs.htm?docid=1261 and for further reading check-out http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/AR/archive/oct08/fuel1008.htm