Recovery of organic acids from fermentation broths

Rising concerns over the use of fossil resources have generated renewed interest in the production of commodity chemicals via fermentation. Organic acids are a particularly attractive target because their functionality enables downstream catalytic upgrading to a variety of compounds. In this article, we survey how common technical issues are addressed in the recovery schemes for several organic acids. We present results for the recovery of acetate using a new method based on amine complexation. Our reactive separation scheme produces a high-purity product, is energy efficient, and avoids the coproduction of a waste salt coproduct, all prerequisites for a large-scale production process.