Tuesday, April 30, 2013: 2:45 PM
Grand Ballroom II, Ballroom Level
Marina Oliveira Souza Dias1, Adriano Pinto Mariano2, Tassia Lopes Junqueira1, Lucas G. Pereira1, Lucas G. Pavanello1, Mateus F. Chagas1, Otavio Cavalett1, Rubens Maciel Filho3 and Antonio Bonomi1, (1)Laboratório Nacional de Ciência e Tecnologia do Bioetanol (CTBE), Campinas, Brazil, (2)Department of Chemical Engineering, State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Campinas-SP, Brazil, (3)School of Chemical Engineering, State University of Campinas, Campinas, Brazil
Butanol has advantages over ethanol when considering its use as biofuel: it has higher energy content, it is not hygroscopic and it is less volatile, having properties closer to those of gasoline. Increased interest in production of butanol from renewable resources for use as a fuel has motivated the investigation and comparison of different routes. The sugarchemistry route, based on ABE (acetone – butanol – ethanol) fermentation of either first or second generation sugars has received most of the attention from both academia and industry, but the alcoholchemical route, based in the conversion of ethanol to butanol using catalysts, has been explored as well.
In this work the production of butanol in a sugarcane biorefinery was investigated, aiming the comparison of the sugarchemistry and alcoholchemistry routes. In the sugarchemistry route, in addition to sugar and ethanol, sugarcane juice is used for production of butanol and acetone (ABE); electricity is produced from sugarcane bagasse. In the alcoholchemistry route, sugarcane is used for sugar, ethanol and electricity production; a fraction of the ethanol produced is converted to butanol and other hydrocarbons using a hydroxyapatite catalyst.
Data from the literature and from the industry was used to simulate the different routes. The economic and environmental impacts of the processes were evaluated, and the benefits and disadvantages of each route (yields, energy consumption, internal rate of return, environmental impacts, etc.) were analyzed. Whichever the route, butanol production within the sugarcane biorefinery has the potential to improve the economics of the process.
