Biosurfactant process engineering and a new era of white unit operations

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The Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil leak from the Macondo well into the Gulf of Mexico illustrate the twin compromises made when we exploit petroleum and its derived products: Firstly, the extreme environment where the leak occurred is a symptom of petroleum oil's finite supply and its increasingly expensive production. Secondly, chemicals and products made out of petroleum, including the 6.6 million litres of dispersants used to manage the spill, tend to be toxic and persistent in the environment. Biosurfactants are the various chemicals produced by nature to help change the surfaces that occur between things - for example, the stickiness forces in a new born baby's scrunched up lungs are weakened by biosurfactants and enable her to breathe in for the first time, and other remarkable things. Biosurfactants produced through fermentation have the potential to outperform traditional surfactants for many tasks, such as cleaning up after oil spills, decontamination ground left toxic by old factories, improving the quality of personal care products like face creams or household products like laundry powders. Not only this, they are also fundamentally more sustainable through their whole life from when they are made to to when they are disposed of. However, the cost of production of biosurfactants is currently far too high to make their widespread use possible - by weight they are ten or a hundred times more expensive to buy than gold. This is because the currently available fermentation production capacity is based around old reactor technology. This research will advance the process engineering science underlying the high cost of biosurfactant production and deliver a coordinated set of solutions which will enable commercial viability, and therefore more widespread exploitation, of biosurfactants.Based on this success, the research group will also work to apply this way of adding new engineering to reduce production cost to a wider range of what could be very useful biologically produced materials, chemicals and fuels and help make them become everyday things like petrol and washing powders are today.