Current status and challenges in biobutanol production
Book chapter, 2018

The superiority of biobutanol as a fuel for vehicles over other biofuels has been reported numerous times in recent years (Kumar and Gayen, 2011). Therefore, fermentative production of butanol has attracted the attention of various new research groups in academia and industries. In a review, we have already summarized the development and challenges in fermentative production of biobutanol until 2011 (Kumar and Gayen, 2011). In this chapter, we will highlight the further developments in this field along with the outstanding challenges. In spite of several advantages of butanol as fuel for vehicles, there are still some challenges in acetone-butanol-ethanol (ABE) fermentation in terms of low butanol titer, low productivity, and low yield, high cost of pretreatment of cellulosic feedstocks, presence of toxic compounds in feedstock hydrolysates, product inhibition, and costly and low efficiency recovery processes, which make biobutanol less competitive than other biofuels like bioethanol and biodiesel (Zheng et al., 2015). These challenges are being addressed using several strategies. Details of these strategies are discussed in different sections of this chapter.

Author

Manish Kumar

Chalmers, Biology and Biological Engineering, Systems and Synthetic Biology

Tridib Kumar Bhowmick

National Institute of Technology Agartala

Supreet Saini

Indian Institute of Technology

Kalyan Gayen

National Institute of Technology Agartala

Bioenergy and Biofuels

237-262
978-113803281-1 (ISBN)

Subject Categories

Renewable Bioenergy Research

Chemical Process Engineering

Bioenergy

DOI

10.1201/9781351228138

More information

Latest update

5/30/2024