From laboratory to wings: Biobased production of farnesene

The strategic partnership between Total and Amyris aims to produce biomolecules for renewable fuels and chemicals, and in particular for blending with Diesel and Jet Fuel. Large scale production and commercialization of the flagship molecule farnesene (Biofene®) began in 2012 at Amyris’s production plant in Brazil. Farnesene has many potential applications as a renewable feedstock for diesel fuel, polymers, and cosmetics. Farnesene upon hydrogenation forms farnesane that can be mixed directly into diesel or jet fuels without requiring any engine modifications and is certified under ASTM D7566 as Jet A/A1.

Amyris employs a multi-stage scale-up approach to progress from laboratory scale (0.5-2L) to commercial production scale of 200 m³ bubble column reactors. We continuously improve the quality of our scale down model by carefully controlling critical parameters for scale up success and infrequently checking harder to implement aspects. This give us confidence that our strains will scale effectively and ensure that our development efforts to improve strains will be well spent. For example, we routinely experiment with various parameters using our scale down model in order to mimic production conditions such as temperature, raw materials, OTR, feeding strategy, foaming, and typical industrial variabilities to continuously improve scale down model and lab scale screening process. Our scale-down model can successfully predict performance at the 200 m³ scale and we have implemented simplified cost models to compare the production cost impact of strains or process modifications. In this presentation, some of these scale up aspects will be discussed.