Journal
ENERGY & ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE
Volume 9, Issue 3, Pages 1042-1049Publisher
ROYAL SOC CHEMISTRY
DOI: 10.1039/c5ee02940f
Keywords
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Funding
- U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research [DE-AC02-05CH11231]
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Producing concentrated sugars and minimizing water usage are key elements in the economics and environmental sustainability of advanced biofuels. Conventional pretreatment processes that require a water-wash step can result in losses of fermentable sugars and generate large volumes of wastewater or solid waste. To address these problems, we have developed high gravity biomass processing with a one-pot conversion technology that includes ionic liquid pretreatment, enzymatic saccharification, and yeast fermentation for the production of concentrated fermentable sugars and high-titer cellulosic ethanol. The use of dilute bio-derived ionic liquids (a.k.a. bionic liquids) enables one-pot, high-gravity bioethanol production due to their low toxicity to the hydrolytic enzyme mixtures and microbes used. We increased biomass digestibility at 430 wt% loading by understanding the relationship between ionic liquid and biomass loading, yielding 41.1 g L-1 of ethanol (equivalent to an overall yield of 74.8% on glucose basis) using an integrated one-pot fed-batch system. Our technoeconomic analysis indicates that the optimized one-pot configuration provides significant economic and environmental benefits for cellulosic biorefineries by reducing the amount of ionic liquid required by similar to 90% and pretreatment-related water inputs and wastewater generation by B85%. In turn, these improvements can reduce net electricity use, greenhouse gas-intensive chemical inputs for wastewater treatment, and waste generation. The result is an overall 40% reduction in the cost of cellulosic ethanol produced and a reduction in local burdens on water resources and waste management infrastructure.
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