Industrial biomanufacturing: The future of chemical production

Abstract

The current model for industrial chemical manufacturing employs large-scale megafacilities that benefit from economies of unit scale. However, this strategy faces environmental, geographical, political, and economic challenges associated with energy and manufacturing demands. We review how exploiting biological processes for manufacturing (i.e., industrial biomanufacturing) addresses these concerns while also supporting and benefiting from economies of unit number. Key to this approach is the inherent small scale and capital efficiency of bioprocesses and the ability of engineered biocatalysts to produce designer products at high carbon and energy efficiency with adjustable output, at high selectivity, and under mild process conditions. The biological conversion of single-carbon compounds represents a test bed to establish this paradigm, enabling rapid, mobile, and widespread deployment, access to remote and distributed resources, and adaptation to new and changing markets.

A General State-Space Formulation for Online Scheduling

“…Several commercial sectors, rely on these, for example, pharmaceuticals, food and beverage processing, agriculture, waste treatment, etc. Furthermore, there is an increasing thrust towards finding biological routes for production of bulk chemicals [83]. The use of live systems in bio-manufacturing, however, introduces several operational challenges.…”

Gas fermentation of C1 feedstocks: commercialization status and future prospects

“…The current production of biogas is only between 0.2 and 0.6 billion m 3 annually . For the sake of comparison, the current US production of CH 4 from these secondary sources is nearly 13.9 billion m 3 per year …”

“…Biological production systems relying on either photosynthetic or nonphotosynthetic microorganisms that assimilate C1 feedstocks could significantly broaden this spectrum . Some excellent reviews focus on the related microorganisms, metabolic routes and process advances, but there is no current product‐oriented review highlighting technologies at commercialization status. Considering the very cost‐intensive and time‐consuming nature of developing a microbial strain capable of feasibly producing target molecules, the knowledge of attainable products is relevant for informed decision making.…”

Expanding the boundary of biocatalysis: design and optimization of in vitro tandem catalytic reactions for biochemical production

“…The cascade or concurrent reactions catalyzed by multiple enzymes demonstrate the strongest synthetic power in nature, which makes an irreversible process reversible, eliminates inhibition problems caused by excess product, or circumvents the lack of substrate scattered in bulk solution. The synergistic effect of natural synthetic networks inspires chemists to develop artificial multi-step tandem reactions for selective synthesis of complex molecules (Clomburg et al, 2017). To date, tandem reactions by using whole microorganisms ( in vivo ) have been extensively studied in the synthetic biology and metabolic engineering fields (Nielsen et al, 2016).…”