Clostridia: An emerging anaerobic industrial platform for high value chemical production

Green Biologics (GBL) is a renewable chemical company currently commissioning the first new Acetone-Butanol-Ethanol (ABE) plant to be built in the USA since 1938. GBLs technology is a bacterial fermentation, converting renewable or waste feedstocks to bio-acetone and bio-butanol. Currently butanol and acetone are derived from oil but the fermentation bio-products have superior characteristics, giving them an advantage in consumer markets. GBLs strain development programme aims to deploy the same robust microbes to produce a wider range of non-native, but natural, bio-chemicals through fermentation. Dynamic Extractions (DE) and BioExtractions Wales (BEW) provide innovative solutions for the purification of chemicals from complex mixtures. DE’s chromatography method will be applied to the extraction of these example chemicals from fermentation broth and BEW will evaluate purification and (bio)chemical transformation to higher value products. A critical need in developing new technologies is ensuring that end-user views and current market dynamics are taken into account. A social science intern will explore stakeholder perspectives in order to gauge the social feasibility of this work.