Acid Catalyzed Production of Green Butadiene from Butanediols (GREEN-B2B)

GREEN-B2B opens the way to the sustainable production of bulk chemicals such as butadiene (BD) from biomass, while at the same time avoiding CO2 emissions. By clever integration of functionalities in micro-organisms, the CO2 inherently produced during fermentation will be reused during the process itself. Thanks to innovation in genetic engineering, catalyst design and synthesis, and kinetic and process modeling through a diverse, yet
complementary team of ambitious scientists, leaps and bounds will be made in the microbial production of butanediols (BDOs) from paper and board hydrolyzate (and CO2) followed by the acid-catalyzed conversion into BD, supported by fundamental modeling.
The goal of GREEN-B2B as sprint cSBO is to screen different, alternative bio-based BD production routes. The emphasis is in particular on the fermentation for 1,3-, 1,4- and 2,3-BDO production and the subsequent acid-catalyzed conversion of these BDO isomers to BD. The number of production routes to be investigated exceeds what can reasonably be achieved experimentally within 18 months. Thus, the experimental focus will be on the route to 1,3-BDO followed by the acid-catalyzed conversion into BD in 1 step. Using the fundamental modeling, a larger number of potentially relevant production routes can be investigated with a minimum of selected additional experiments.