生物丁醇制造技术现状和展望

丁醇是大宗基础化工原料,并有望成为新一代生物燃料。利用可再生原料通过微生物发酵生产丁醇受到人们的很大关注。然而,与石油原料制造丁醇相比,目前生物丁醇的制造成本偏高。生物丁醇制造技术按重要性排序:在廉价原料替代、低丁醇浓度及存在丙酮、乙醇低值副产物3个方面有改进空间。上海生物丁醇协作组设定了由易到难的技术路线图:通过代谢工程提高丁醇比例;在丁醇高耐受菌株中导入和优化丁醇合成途径;去除葡萄糖阻遏效应使之可利用复杂原料。协作组相信,通过与国内外广泛的产学研合作,应可在不远的将来开发出有经济竞争力并可持续发展的生物丁醇生产工艺。

Current status and prospects of biobutanol manufacturing technology

Butanol is not only an important chemical feedstock but also expected to become a new generation biofuel. Thus, biological butanol production using renewable feedstocks has attracted renewed attention due to the worries of global oil supply and its impact on social and economic development. However, compared with petrochemical-derived butanol, biological butanol production is still not economically competition, because of its major drawbacks: high cost of the feedstocks, low butanol concentration in the fermentation broth and the co-production of low-value byproducts acetone and ethanol. Recently, Shanghai cooperative bio-butanol group (SCBG) developed a simple-to-complex technical route to improve bio-butanol production with a focus on: increasing butanol ratio in the solvent through metabolic engineering of Clostridia spp.; introducing and optimizing the butanol synthetic pathway in the species with high butanol tolerance; overcoming the glucose repression effect to utilize low-cost non-grain based feedstocks. SCBG believes that, through extensive domestic and international industry-university-research cooperation, a sustainable and economically viable process for biological butanol production can be established in the near future.