Biodiesel Production: Biotechnological Approach

Fermentation is used to transform raw materials such as sugar, starch or other substrates with living cells to more complex target products such as alcohols, ketones, vitamins, antibiotics, amino acids or often achiral organic molecules. Biodiesel together with glycerol are produced by transesterification process, which can be carried out by two ways, chemically catalyzed or biocatalytically. Where, methanol from non-renewable oil is the most used raw material. Chemical catalysis has several drawbacks as fatty acid alkaline salts (soaps) generation, difficult glycerol recovering, energetically intensive process, using alkaline catalysts or elevated reaction temperatures and high reaction times using catalysis acid. Biocatalytic approach -whole-cell or enzymatic- is located at the interface between fermentation processes and petrol-based chemistry. This work reviews the biodiesel production through biocatalytic process, and analyzes the biotechnological transformation of glycerol (by product of biodiesel production) to ethanol (a potentially important raw material in biodiesel production), and other bioconversion products