Abstract
Over the past years, microbial chain elongation has received increased attention as a way to produce high value products. This study investigates the economic feasibility of converting ethanol and acetate into caproic acid, using pertraction-based continuous product removal. Feedstock cost, CAPEX and electricity consumption were identified as being the most important cost factors. It was found that the system performance achieved at pilot scale (productivity of 2.5 g/L·d, COD conversion efficiency of 50%) is insufficient to make the process competitive with current market prices. Higher productivity levels could not be achieved experimentally, as when additional inputs were fed to the system these remained largely unconverted. This suggests that the main constraint lies at the fermentation side.
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