(99f) Production and Separation of Fermentation-Derived Acetic Acid

Acetic acid is a large volume chemical product. Currently, 80 percent of the U.S. production of virgin acetic acid is produced by methanol carbonylation. Production costs are strongly tied to natural gas. Therefore, there are strong market, economic, and energy benefits to developing processes for production of acetic acid from alternative feedstocks. The advantages of producing acetic acid by fermentation include its appropriateness for regional-scale production, lower cost feedstocks, suitability for low energy membrane-based purification, and lower temperature and pressure requirements. In this project, we developed strains for fermenting syngas to acetate and evaluated several membrane-based separations technologies for recovery of the acid.