Kirsten Ulonska

Systematic Screening of Fermentation Products as Future Platform Chemicals for Biofuels

The production of biofuels must be economically and ecologically viable, in particular due to the competition with existing mature fossil-based fuels. There are many alternative products and pathways to generate biofuels. Hence, focusing on the most promising products and process alternatives requires identification of corresponding pathways from biomass to biofuel candidates using scarce data of high uncertainty. This contribution presents a methodology for i) process evaluation of fermentation and downstream processing (DP) in terms of costs and primary energy demand (PED) as main sustainability criteria and ii) identification of the most promising platform chemicals gained by fermentation for a biofuel production. The methodology considers the energy requirement already at an early design stage bridging the gap between performance screenings solely based on reaction stoichiometry and time-consuming process design, enabling an early process analysis, detection of bottlenecks and ranking of various processes. The focus herein is on lignocellulosic biomass.