(564d) Economic Design of Bioconversion Process: Natural Gas to Isobutanol

The low cost and abundant supply of natural gas have been motivators for the development of many technologies that convert this low cost carbon feedstock into compounds of greater value. Natural gas bioconversion is a developmental technology which applies synthetic biology to a naturally methane consuming bacteria, a methanotroph, to program it to produce higher value materials of interest. Intrexon has formed joint ventures to commercialize methanotrophic bioprocesses for biofuels and high value chemical intermediates.

Using a methanotrophic bioprocess to produce fuels and chemicals has several advantages other than the low cost and minimal processing of feedstock. Natural gas bioconversion offers scaling opportunities beyond traditional gas-to-liquid (GTL) facilities, as well as biomass feedstock facilities. Theoretical yields of methanotroph/methane exceed that of yeast/sugar approaches by a wide margin. Biocatalytic processes that achieve high yields under milder processing conditions allow for reduced capital and operation expenditures, offering greater economic viability.

Intrexonâ??s flagship molecule of interest in the methanotroph platform is isobutanol, a fuel for gasoline blending which has several positive attributes. Isobutanol is a clean burning â??drop-­inâ? fuel which can be blended with gasoline and is compatible with the existing petroleum infrastructure. Currently, provisions allow for bio-butanol blending up to 12.5% with gasoline and ASTM specifications exist for sale as fuel. Combustion of isobutanol has cleaner emissions as compared to gasoline by reducing hydrocarbon, carbon monoxide, nitrous oxide and sulfur dioxide production. Isobutanol also has advantages over first generation biofuels, such as ethanol, because of its higher energy density.

Currently, the production of both isobutanol and farnesene has been demonstrated in lab scale fermentation. To successfully bring this technology to commercial scale, consideration must be given not only to optimizing the metabolic pathway engineered into the methanotroph, but to key issues in the fermentor design, downstream processing and overall plant economics. Traditional engineering workflows, such as a front-end loading strategy, were used to shape the commercial scale process design. The biologic, technical and economic commercial feasibilities of the end-to-end natural gas to isobutanol process were critical to Intrexonâ??s plant design. Laboratory scale learnings were applied to select technology that was commercially feasible at demonstration scale. This demonstration scale design was scaled down to pilot scale, where the operation will yield learnings into refinement of at-scale design, equipment selection, empirical data on heating and cooling, and controls strategies.