Ethanol Evaporation from Fermenter Often Overlooked

Copyright: © 2012 Agrawal M. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Ethanol is a widely used biofuel. Currently, ethanol is blended with gasoline at a level of 10% (in US) to 85% (in Brazil), so that consumption of non-renewable gasoline can be reduced. Ethanol provided 2.2% of the world’s fuels for road transport in 2010. Among all the biofuels, ethanol has the highest level of production. In 2010 worldwide biofuel production reached 28 billion gallons, of which ethanol accounted for 23 billion gallons. According to the International Energy Agency, biofuels have the potential to meet more than a quarter of world demand for transportation fuels by 2050. Most of ethanol produced today is obtained from corn starch or from sucrose contained in sugarcane and sugar beet. Demonstration plants have been built for producing ethanol from lignocellulose, the most abundant organic resource on earth. Extensive research is being undertaken for commercialization of cellulosic ethanol. Besides developing efficient enzymes or thermochemical processes for breaking down lignocelluloses to sugar, a major portion of the research also focuses on metabolic engineering of microbes so that sugars present in lignocellulosic hydrolysates can be fermented to ethanol with high yield and productivity. Typically, characterization of these recombinant microbes is carried out in fermenters up to 10 liter volume, under anaerobic conditions in a batch process. Comparison of ethanol productivity and yield data is used to establish the effectiveness of the recombinant microbes.