Biobased acrylic acid production in a sugarcane biorefinery: A techno-economic assessment using lactic acid, 3-hydroxypropionic acid and glycerol as intermediates

Acrylic acid (AA) is a versatile platform chemical of immense global demand. Today, the biorefinery is among the most promising initiatives of sustainably producing this commodity from bio-derived precursors. This study evaluated the economic and environmental performance of three production pathways to biobased acrylic acid using sugarcane A-molasses as feedstock. The 3 intermediates were lactic acid (LA), 3-hydroxypropionic acid (3-HP) and glycerol. Production scenarios were simulated in Aspen Plus (R) software and resultant mass and energy flows provided inputs for subsequent estimation of the minimum selling price (MSP) and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The MSP in US $/kgAA and the net GHG in kgCO2/kgAA were the key metrics against which the performance of the developed scenarios were compared. Accordingly, the scenario using LA as intermediate emerged superior with an MSP that was 11 % higher than the actual market price for fossil-based AA. The same had an estimated net GHG emissions of 4.4 kgCO2/kgAA. 3-HP was the second best performing intermediate with an MSP of 2425 US t-1 and green premium of 30 %. The 3-HP pathway, however, had a fairly low yield at fermentation of about 0.51 g LA/g glucose compared to the 1 g LA/gram glucose recorded by the LA pathway. Ultimately, glycerol proved to be an unattractive intermediate owing to a dismal product yield (0.50 g GLY/g glucose) as well as the cost and complexity of glycol recovery from the fermentation soup. (c) 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of Institution of Chemical Engineers. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).