Abstract
Harnessing the natural diversity of plant biomass for producing economically and environmentally sustainable liquid fuels and high-value co-products entails the strategic integration of different technologies, each finely tuned for a unique biomass intermediate, to realize greater synergies in a co-processing schema known as biorefining. Presented here is a techno-economic and life cycle analysis of a hybrid biorefinery strategy that integrates several leading biochemical and catalytic processes to maximize the utilization of lignocellulosic biomass and produce commercially relevant biofuels and bioproducts. High fidelity computer models were assembled to evaluate the impact of feedstock and co-product selection on overall economics and global warming potential of the biorefinery. Central to this biorefinery model is the application of mild co-solvent enhanced lignocellulosic fractionation (CELF) pretreatment as the first step to non-destructively fractionate biomass into clean hemicellulose sugars, cellulose, and lignin intermediates that are funneled to a suite of downstream conversion technologies to yield alcohols, esters, carboxylic acids, and hydrocarbons as co-products. A multiparametric analysis of different process modalities using deterministic evaluation of experimental data and sensitivity analyses reveal the advantages of selecting a feedstock with higher carbon content (poplar wood instead of corn stover), the benefits of selecting a fuel alcohol product with higher yield and titer (ethanol instead of isobutanol) and the outcomes of selecting lignin fate (valorization vs. combustion). The application of supercritical methanol and a copper porous metal oxide catalyst to convert lignin to cyclic hydrocarbons, a component of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), presents mixed outcomes: while this operation further improves carbon recovery from biomass, its inclusion in the biorefinery leads to a carbon footprint penalty in view of the use of methanol for lignin depolymerization. Nevertheless, the CELF biorefinery model demonstrated a possibility of supplying SAF to the market at competitive prices - as low as $3.15 per GGE (gallon of gasoline equivalent) - as well as carboxylic acids and esters.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1202-1215 |
| Number of pages | 14 |
| Journal | Energy and Environmental Science |
| Volume | 17 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Dec 13 2023 |
Funding
The authors acknowledge the support of the Center for Bioenergy Innovation (CBI). The CBI is a U.S. Department of Energy Bioenergy Research Center supported by the Office of Biological and Environmental Research in the DOE Office of Science. Thanks to Dan Olson (Dartmouth) for guidance over the toxicity of alcohols in CBP and other general guidelines. This work was authored in part by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, operated by the Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC, for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) under Contract No. DE-AC36-08GO28308. The views and opinions of the authors expressed herein do not necessarily state or reflect those of the US government or any agency thereof. Neither the US government nor any agency thereof, nor any of their employees, makes any warranty, expressed or implied, or assumes any legal liability or responsibility for the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any information, apparatus, product, or process disclosed, or represents that its use would not infringe privately owned rights. The US government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the US government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this work, or allow others to do so, for US government purposes.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| U.S. Department of Energy Bioenergy Research Center | |
| U.S. Department of Energy | DE-AC36-08GO28308 |
| Office of Science | |
| Biological and Environmental Research | |
| National Renewable Energy Laboratory | |
| Center for Bioenergy Innovation |
