Comparison of acetone–butanol–ethanol fermentation and ethanol catalytic upgrading as pathways for butanol production: A techno-economic and environmental assessment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Butanol is an important compound used as a building block for producing value-added products and an energy carrier. The main butanol production pathways are conventional acetone–butanol–ethanol (ABE) fermentation and catalytic upgrading of ethanol. On the other hand, the application of biomass as a promising substrate for biofuel production has been widely considered recently. However, few studies have compared different butanol production pathways using biomass as raw material. In light of that, the present work aims (i) to provide a short review of the catalytic ethanol upgrading and (ii) to compare conventional ABE fermentation and catalytic ethanol upgrading processes from the economic and environmental perspectives. Aspen Plus v9.0 was used to simulate both processes. The economic and environmental assessments were carried out considering the Colombian economic context, a gate-to-gate approach, and single impact categories. Considering a processing scale of 1000 ton/d, the conventional ABE fermentation process presented a more favorable technical, economic, and environmental performance for butanol production from biomass. It also offered lower net energy consumption (i.e., 57.9 GJ/ton of butanol) and higher butanol production (i.e., 2.59 ton/h). Nevertheless, the proposed processing scale was insufficient to reach economic feasibility for both processes. To overcome this challenge, the minimum processing scale had to be higher than 1584 ton/d and 1920 ton/d for conventional ABE fermentation and catalytic ethanol upgrading, respectively. Another critical factor in enhancing the economic feasibility of both butanol production pathways was the minimum selling price of butanol. More specifically, prices higher than 1.56 USD/kg and 1.80 USD/kg would be required for conventional ABE fermentation and catalytic ethanol upgrading, respectively. From the environmental impact point of view, the conventional ABE fermentation process led to a lower potential environmental impact than catalytic ethanol upgrading (0.12 PEI/kg vs. 0.18 PEI/kg, respectively).
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 |
| 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".