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August 16-17, 2018 | Copenhagen, Denmark
Industrial Biotechnology and Bioprocessing
International Conference on
Journal of Archives of Industrial Biotechnology | Volume 2
Despite continuous improvements in the efficiency of
the jet engine, the world consumption of jet fuel is
constantly growing ca. 5% a year and is expected to reach a
total of 385 million tons in 2035 up from 243 mill tons today.
Even the most positive outlook for crude oil production
is still a pessimistic scenario for the aviation industry. Jet
fuel is a specific mid-range distillate and this fraction is only
accounting for 4-5% of the initial crude oil. To meet the
aviation industries need for fuels in the future along with their
targets for reducing the carbon footprint, solutions for large-
scale production of aviation biofuels is in focus right now.
In the presentation, I will discuss some current solution
for producing aviation biofuels such as the Alcohol to
Jet pathway of producing cellulosic ethanol, butanol and
propanol by fermentation of cellulosic sugars followed by
catalytic upgrading to bio-jet. While different mutant of
yeast is the main biocatalyst for the alcohol production, I
will further show some new pathways from our laboratory
based on homo-lactic acid fermentation with Bacillus strains
as well as mixed acids production with microbial consortia.
Finally, I will show results on direct fermentation of biomass
sugars to jet fuels components using mutant of Aspergillus
carbonarius engineered with genes from blue-green bacteria.
Speaker Biography
Birgitte K Ahring is a Battelle Distinguished Professor at Washington State University.
During her years at WSU she established a new line of research in a dedicated building
for bio-products research further including the biomass group out of Pacific Northwest
National Laboratory, PNNL. Her research group has worked intensively for years on
biorefinery solutions to the production of biofuels and bio-products with a focus on
tailoring biocatalyst and optimization of fermentation to products. Besides, she is
the inventor of the advanced wet explosion pretreatment process, a process, which
has been found to be superior, for making biomass materials available for further
processing to bio-products and biofuels. This process is now in industrial scale with
a planned major expansion over the coming years. She has published more than 400
papers, has 22801 citations and an H-factor of 79.
e:
Birgitte K Ahring
Washington State University, USA
Biochemical production of aviation biofuels or bio-jet precursors from lignocellulosic
biomass materials