Economic Analysis of Simulated Biobased 1,3-Propanediol Production Process

Over-production of glycerol from biodiesel industry has led to a reduction in its sale prices. One way to make it profitable is carrying out a fermentative transformation towards a high value added product such as 1,3-propanediol. The production of this diol from industrial glycerol grade (80% w/w) was technically and economically evaluated using Clostridium sp. in fed-batch fermentation with an inorganic nitrogen source. Considering that fermentation broth is composed by several metabolites and biomass, solid-liquid phase was treated by centrifugation and liquid multicomponent phase separation was approached by evaporation and a distillation train stage. This latter was modeled using NRTL parameters regressed by data from literature. The process produces 1,3-propanediol with a purity greater than 99% by weight suitable for commercial use. A few variables were taken into account such as split of glycerol for batch and fed-batch stages, glycerol price, the total flow and concentration of glycerol fed in fermentation in order to evaluate economic process feasibility with an industrial scale approach and contextualized within the current state of market.