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Economic and environmental impacts of microbial biodiesel

Nature Biotechnology volume 31, pages 789–793 (2013)Cite this article

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To the Editor:

A recent issue of Nature Biotechnology published a study by Dugar and Stephanopoulos1 evaluating the relative metabolic pathway efficiencies for the production of different chemicals by microbial-based means. Below, we use a similar approach to evaluate mass and energetic pathway efficiencies for the production of different biodiesels using genome-scale metabolic models (GEMs), choosing the most widely used cell factory, the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, as our model. We also perform economic, technical and environmental evaluations by combining the former outcomes with results obtained from industrial process analysis using flowcharts based on proposed unit operations in sugar-based advanced biofuel production plants. To our knowledge, this is the first published analysis of yields, cost of goods sold (COGS), net energy balance (NEB) and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for microbial-based biodiesel production and thus represents an important evaluation of the economic feasibility and environmental attractiveness of this process.

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Figure 1: Overview of the metabolic pathways required for the production of FAEE from glucose or xylose.
Figure 2: Net energy balance (NEB) and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for the entire production process with a productivity of 3.71 grams per liter per hour.

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Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge financial support from European Research Council, FORMAS and Vetenskapsrådet. We thank D. Porro, S. Bordel, A. Roldão, K. Buijs and V. Siewers for constructive comments.

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  1. Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden

    Luis Caspeta & Jens Nielsen

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  1. Luis Caspeta
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Correspondence to Jens Nielsen.

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Caspeta, L., Nielsen, J. Economic and environmental impacts of microbial biodiesel. Nat Biotechnol 31, 789–793 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.2683

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