Towards large scale fermentative production of succinic acid

Fermentative production of succinic acid (SA) from renewable carbohydrate feed-stocks can have the economic and sustainability potential to replace petroleum-based production in the future, not only for existing markets, but also new larger volume markets. To accomplish this, extensive efforts have been undertaken in the field of strain construction and metabolic engineering to optimize SA production in the last decade. However, relatively little effort has been put into fermentation process development. The choice for a specific host organism determines to a large extent the process configuration, which in turn influences the environmental impact of the overall process. In the last five years, considerable progress has been achieved towards commercialization of fermentative production of SA. Several companies have demonstrated their confidence about the economic feasibility of fermentative SA production by transferring their processes from pilot to production scale.