A Technoeconomic Platform for Early-Stage Process Design and Cost Estimation of Joint Fermentative‒Catalytic Bioprocessing

Abstract

Technoeconomic analyses using established tools such as SuperPro Designer^® require a level of detail that is typically unavailable at the early stage of process evaluation. To facilitate this, members of our group previously created a spreadsheet-based process modeling and technoeconomic platform explicitly aimed at joint fermentative‒catalytic biorefinery processes. In this work, we detail the reorganization and expansion of this model—ESTEA2 (Early State Technoeconomic Analysis, version 2), including detailed design and cost calculations for new unit operations. Furthermore, we describe ESTEA2 validation using ethanol and sorbic acid process. The results were compared with estimates from the literature, SuperPro Designer^® (Version 8.5, Intelligen Inc., Scotch Plains, NJ, 2013), and other third-party process models. ESTEA2 can perform a technoeconomic analysis for a joint fermentative‒catalytic process with just 12 user-supplied inputs, which, when modeled in SuperPro Designer^®, required approximately eight additional inputs such as equipment design configurations. With a reduced amount of user information, ESTEA2 provides results similar to those in the literature, and more sophisticated models (ca. 7%–11% different).