New pipeline makes valuable organic acid from plants–saving money and emissions

This is great, assuming it still works after scaled up testing. My university used to do a lot of what they called “bucket chemistry” scaling up reactions for industrial scale. They had those labs on the top floor with double thickness concrete floor so it would only blow the roof off in case of the worst outcome.

“ The pilot-scale work showed the new strains could produce up to 110 g/L of succinic acid and, after batch fermentation and downstream processing, an overall yield of 64%”

“could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 34% to 90% relative to fossil fuel-based production processes.” - so still a lot of uncertainty then.

Based on technological advances and an increased need for renewable intermediates in different application fields, BASF and Corbion Purac have been working on the development of biobased succinic acid since 2009.

https://www.basf.com/ru/ru/media/news-releases/2014/03/p-14-...

>The team of University of Illinois and Princeton University researchers created a cost-effective, end-to-end pipeline for this valuable organic acid by engineering a tough, acid-tolerant yeast as the fermenting agent, avoiding costly steps in downstream processing.

Seems like the most important part, they modified yeast to make it for them which can keep making the acid without needing to constantly adjust the pH to keep them alive, which introduces things that have to be removed later at great cost.