Economic comparison of a continuous ABE fermentation with and without the integration of an in situ vacuum separation unit
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The development of renewable fuels has achieved enormous progress motivated by the rapid decline in petroleum resources and their oscillating price. After a wave of interest in bioethanol and biodiesel, biobutanol has been intensely investigated over the last decade and is considered a suitable renewable fuel. Biobutanol is most often produced through the Acetone‐Butanol‐Ethanol (ABE) bacterial fermentation process. This process is plagued, however, with high recovery costs because of the low final butanol concentration (∼0.01 g/g, 1 wt %) due to product inhibition on the microorganisms. To partly alleviate this problem and increase productivity, in situ butanol recovery techniques from the fermentation broth were proposed. These integrated methods increase the final concentration of butanol, and as a result improve the separation efficiency of the process. This paper compares the economic feasibility of a large‐scale continuous ABE fermentation process with and without integrating a vacuum separation unit. It is illustrated that based on the current market price of butanol, only the integrated fermentation process is economically feasible for discount rates up to ∼45 %. Adding an in situ butanol recovery technique made this process profitable compared to the conventional fermentation process analyzed under two different scenarios: constant fermenter volume and constant butanol production rate. The net present values (NPV) of the conventional process were found to be negative for both scenarios, whereas the integrated vacuum process had a NPV of US$ 87 000 000 at the end of 10 years of operation based on a discount rate of 10 %.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".