2. Industrial biotechnology: antibiotics / amino acids / citrate / butanol / aceton / ethene
Focus lies for now on butanol and aceton. Butanol is a product of fermentation and forms rubber. Aceton
was a by-product from butanol production. A few years later, it was found that Clostridium acetobutylicum
could be used for this process. This is a bacterium that produces spores, which are hard to clean from
bioreactors. Acetone is used for the production of cordite, used in WW1. The production reached large
industrial scale, but in 1960 the production stopped. This was because crude oil became very cheap so that
biotechnological processes became too expensive compared to the use of crude oil. When the price of crude
oil raised, it became more feasible to use biotechnology for the compound production. Energy can be made
of sun and wind, but for compounds you need biomass. That is why biotechnology has such high importance.
Another example: ethene production can be petrochemical, using crude oil. Oil is cracked [heated,
distillation] and one of the biggest fractions is ethene. It can also be biotechnological: fermentation and
reduction of sugar. But this is not a rendable process: the sucrose forms only 1/3 of the initial amount
sucrose to ethene. This production is thus limited by the available substrate; sugar can also be used for food.
Another example is the production of citrate by Aspergillus Niger. Long time ago, lemons were used for
citrate production, but nowadays this is not done anymore.
Second generation biotechnology is nowadays seen in pharmaceutics [penicillin], environmental [water
purification] and food [citrate].
3. Modern biotechnology: application of gene technology in pharmaceutical (human proteins), enzymes, fine
chemicals, food, detergents and plants.
If you use a GMO instead of a conventional organism, you can save about 50% of water and costs. But
consumers first have to accept the use of GMOs. RIVM research every year releases a trend analysis with
new biotechnogical applications, but approval of these techniques takes time and money. Consumer
acceptance thus is a hurdle for modern biotechnology.
The first widely used third generation biotechnology product was human insulin.
Economical feasibility of biotechnological processes depends on:
- Market
- Politics: cost regulation for our substrates e.g.
- Competition:
o Available substrate: sugar, used for ethene or food? Food vs. fuel competition plays a role
o Relation price – volume product
o Purity product / concentration in H 2O
o Production CO2: if you produce less CO2, you get more money
Alternative classification:
- Red biotechnology: medical/healthcare
- Green biotechnology: agriculture/agro-food
- Blue biotechnology: marine and environmental biotechnology, getting rid of pollution by cleaning air, water
and soil.
- White biotechnology: biobased technology, constant, slow growth. It replaces petrochemical production
lines and uses renewable resources. In a biobased circular economy, there is always biomass lost. There is a
maximum on what is recyclable and there is always a supply of biomass needed.
o Biochemicals [highest value]: pharmaceuticals and fine chemicals
o Biomaterials: polymers
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