Bottleneck and Countermeasure on Biodiesel Production by Lipase-catalysis / 中国生物工程杂志

ABSTRACT

Biodiesel, a nontoxic,cleaning, renewable and biodegradable fuel, is expected as a substitute for conventional fossil diesel. There are three main approaches to produce biodiesel, alkali-catalysis processing, enzymatic-catalysis processing and supercritical processing. With the unique property of energy-saving and environment-friendly, enzymatic-catalysis appears a great potential for industrial application. The main bottleneck of this technology is high cost and low stability of the lipase, as well as the inactivation of lipase by methanol and so on. To settle the problem, several methods have been used including the fixed-bed bioreactor, enzyme immobilized processing, whole-cell biocatalyst, changing addition method of methanol, developing of novel acyl acceptor, enhancing methanol resistance of lipase. The main problems and the relative strategy research of the enzymatic-catalysis technology were sum up.