A senior lecturer at the University of Manchester, England, he used them in 1916 as a bio-chemical tool to produce at the same time, jointly, acetone, ethanol, and n-butanol from starch.

The alcohols were used to produce vehicle fuels and synthetic rubber.

Unlike yeast, which can digest only some sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide, C. acetobutylicum and other Clostridia can digest whey, sugar, starch, cellulose and perhaps certain types of lignin, yielding n-butanol, propionic acid, ether, and glycerin.

In 2008, a strain of Escherichia coli was genetically engineered to synthesize butanol; the genes were derived from Clostridium acetobutylicum.

One of the crucial enzymes - a fatty acyl-CoA reductase - came from Clostridium acetobutylicum.