Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Energy Beets, non-food sugar beets intended for energy production, are an attractive feedstock for renewable biofuel production in California, although thorough technical, economic, and environmental assessments have not yet been completed. Utilization of the whole beet (roots and leaves) employing multiple conversion pathways, including fermentation and anaerobic digestion, as well as consolidation and optimization of traditional processing, extraction, and fermentation operations are expected to increase project technical, financial, and environmental efficiencies. Preliminary process modeling of technical and financial metrics to aid process design are presented here. This study also investigates direct fermentation to ethanol of very high gravity whole beet mashes using Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Escherichia coli KO11 employing batch and fed-batch fermentation trials for screening of optimum process conditions as a key element in a beet-based biorefinery model.