Technical Evaluation of a Levulinic Acid Plant Based on Biomass Transformation under Techno-Economic and Exergy Analyses

Abstract

Levulinic acid (LA) recently has attracted much attention as a promising biorefinery platform due to its potential to be economical and sustainable. This paper addresses technical, techno-economic, and exergetic analyses of an industrial LA production via acid-catalyzed dehydration. The process was simulated through Aspen Plus, considering a processing capacity of 15,175.60 kg/h of banana empty fruit bunches. The global productivity yield was 25.56%, producing 3883.13 kg/h of LA. The techno-economic analysis evidenced that this process may be an attractive alternative for biomass valorization, considering the obtained financial results. This process's total production cost was 0.178 $USD per kilogram of biomass and a total annualized cost of $USD 29,163,638.95. Exergy analysis revealed that this process had an irreversibility rate of 1.48 × 10 5 MJ/h. The pretreatment stage presented the lowest exergetic efficiency. Globally, the exergy efficiency was 53.76%, which is within the reported results for analogous biomass transformation processes.

Design of Minimal Waste Process for Levulinic and Formic Acids Production from Glucose by Using Choline Chloride Added Aluminum Chloride Catalyst System

“…us, furfural solvent has the advantage of separating and purifying LA. Although no information regarding energy requirements for speci c units in the process was reported by Hurtado et al (2021), the energy requirement in our process for the purifying FA and recycling catalysts, was comparable with the process reported by Hurtado et al (2021). However, the energy requirement of this process was approximately 2.5 times higher than that of the Nhien et al (2016) process.…”

“…Hence, the highest annual production rates resulted in the lowest MSP and vice versa. e MSPs were 4.3 times and 1.3 times higher than those reported by Hurtado et al (2021) and Sadhukhan et al (2016), respectively. Note that those studies were operated in a plant capacity larger than 15,000 kg/h, which is 15 times larger than that of our process.…”

“…ey reported that the cost of LA production was 4.32 Euro/kg-LA, with an internal rate of return (IRR) of 6.1%. Hurtado et al (2021) recently designed a process for LA production from banana empty fruit using an H 2 SO 4 catalyst and conducted techno-economic and exergy analyses. ey reported that the total energy input was 146.3 GJ/h, and the total capital and annual operating costs were 8.87 and 39.4 MUSD, respectively.…”

Levulinic acid production from furfural: process development and techno-economics

“…Meramo Hurtado et al estimated the TAC as $29.2 MM for the production of LA at 25.6% efficiency from biomass (banana empty fruit bunches@$0.16 per kg), with a processing capacity of 360 metric tons per day. 58 Tacchini et al estimated the TAC as $56.4 MM for a plant production capacity of 2000 metric tons per day of biomass (oil palm empty fruit bunch) with an efficiency of 27%. 59 The MSP obtained at 38% efficiency (maximum theoretical yield from biomass) was comparable to the price projected to attain at higher production rates in the literature.…”

Bioproduction of propionic acid using levulinic acid by engineered Pseudomonas putida

“…The market price of biologically produced PA is 2.00–3.00 $/kg ( Ammar & Philippidis, 2021 ). On the other hand, using biomass is considered a potential way to decrease the LA price by less than 1 $/kg, through Biofine ( Hayes et al, 2006 ) and other processes ( Kang et al, 2018 ; Meramo Hurtado et al, 2021 ). Thus, LA can serve as a sustainable product that can revitalize the cellulosic biomass-based biorefinery industry.…”