In industrial ethanol production process, the increase of the ethanol concentration in the fermentation broth inhibits cellular growth and product biosynthesis, resulting in ethanol-productivity reduction. Extractive fermentation is an alternative technique that can be used to reduce product inhibition by the ethanol removal from the fermentation broth. The objective of the present work was to evaluate ethanol production by extractive batch fermentation using oleic acid as extractant in a drop column reactor. A mathematical modeling of conventional and extractive ethanol fermentation was then performed considering cell growth, substrate consumption and ethanol production, and the ethanol removal. The hybrid Andrews−Levenspiel model was able to describe the kinetics of the conventional fermentation process predicting faithfully the extractive fermentation behavior. The extractive fermentation had earlier substrate exhaustion (around 1.5 h) when compared to the conventional fermentations.