Ethanol is considered as a renewable transport fuels and demand is expected to grow. In this work, trends related to bio-ethanol production are described using Thailand as an example. Developments on high-temperature fermentation and membrane technologies are also explained. This study focuses on the application of membranes in ethanol recovery after fermentation. A preliminary simulation was performed to compare different process configurations to concentrate 10 wt ethanol to 99.5 wt using membranes. In addition to the significant energy reduction achieved by replacing azeotropic distillation with membrane dehydration, employing ethanol-selective membranes can further reduce energy demand. Silicalite membrane is a type of membrane showing one of the highest ethanol-selective permeation performances reported today. A silicalite membrane was applied to separate a bio-ethanol solution produced via high-temperature fermentation followed by a single distillation. The influence of contaminants in the bio-ethanol on the membrane properties and required further developments are also discussed. © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.