RESEARCH ARTICLE
The Minimum Water Consumption of Ethanol Production via Biomass Fermentation
P.H. Pfromm*
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2008Volume: 2
First Page: 1
Last Page: 5
Publisher ID: TOCENGJ-2-1
DOI: 10.2174/1874123100802010001
Article History:
Received Date: 08/11/2007Revision Received Date: 11/12/2007
Acceptance Date: 11/01/2008
Electronic publication date: 18/1/2008
Collection year: 2008
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
The water consumption of fermentation-based bio-ethanol production has recently begun to attract public attention. We calculate a minimum consumption of 2.85 gal water/gal of ethanol produced assuming zero liquid discharge and otherwise current industrial practice data. Including cooling tower blowdown and drift this value may increase to on the order of 4 gal water/gal of ethanol produced. Reduction of the thermal energy input to the process is vital to reduce this irretrievable water consumption.