Preliminary economic assessment: a valuable tool to establish biocatalytic process feasibility with an in-lab immobilized lipase.

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Despite the interest that commercial lipases arouse, the number of 20 industrial applications is still very limited. Only high added value products such as 21 cosmetic ingredients that can simultaneously benefit of “green chemistry” and “natural” 22 labels of using biocatalysts can justify the final cost. In any case, process feasibility 23 economic assesment in the first project stages must be done to take decisions about its 24 industrial applicability. RESULTS: This work presents an economic study of cetyl esters 1 mixture production 2 process similar to natural spermaceti catalyzed by different in-lab immobilized lipase 3 derivatives to determine if they can compete, not only in catalytic properties (activity 4 and stability) but also in price, with the commercial ones. Among results highlight that 5 CALB lipase immobilized in Amberlite™ XAD™ 1180 whose direct total cost (1.20 6 €/g) is comparable to commercial lipases, is also effective in spermaceti biocatalytic 7 synthesis achieving, under optimal conditions, a 98 % of conversion in less than one.CONCLUSION: High conversion values and it reusability (at least 15 times) ,provides a product with a price (58 €/kg) similar to the obtained with the well known Novozym® 9 10 435 (56.5 €/kg). The future scale-up will allows to better study the process and gives a 11 more realistic product final price.