Valorizing prickly pear cladodes via methane‐arrested anaerobic digestion for carboxylic acid production

To address climate change, liquid biofuels are an essential alternative to fossil fuels, especially for transportation. The carboxylate platform uses methane‐arrested anaerobic digestion (MAAD) to ferment biomass to carboxylic acids, which can be chemically converted to liquid fuels via the carboxylate platform. Most biomass sources require expensive pretreatments to remove lignin; however, prickly pear (Opuntia ficus‐indica) cladodes have low lignin content and therefore do not require pretreatment. Furthermore, this sugar‐rich feedstock is readily digested to high concentrations of carboxylic acids. At various substrate concentrations, batch MAAD of prickly pear cladodes yielded primarily acetic, butyric, and caproic acids. From these batch data, continuum particle distribution modeling (CPDM) simulated four‐stage countercurrent digestion. At a non‐acid volatile solid (NAVS) concentration of 100 g/Lliq, CPDM predicts a high total acid concentration of 93 g/L and conversion of 0.93 g NAVSdigested/NAVSfed at a volatile solid loading rate of 6 g/(Lliq·d) and liquid retention time of 35 days. Without chemical pretreatment, co‐digestion, or in situ product removal, prickly pear produced high yields, biomass conversion, product concentration, and selectivity compared to previously studied lignocellulosic feedstocks.