Human ingenuity trumps the Global Warming hoax and Climate Change religion anytime! The study was already published in December 2023.
Farming of biofuels is more and more becoming a reality and could replace fossil fuels one day.
"... It's distinct from biofuel, in that second-generation SAF doesn't use corn, sugar cane, soy or other food crops. That's a heinous waste of land and water. Instead, feedstocks like wood residues from milling operations, sugarcane bagasse, corn stover and other cheap, abundant waste products are used. ..."
"When it comes to making fuel from plants, the first step has always been the hardest — breaking down the plant matter. A new study finds that introducing a simple, renewable chemical to the pretreatment step can finally make next-generation biofuel production both cost-effective and carbon neutral. ...
To overcome the lignin hurdle, ... invented CELF, which stands for co-solvent enhanced lignocellulosic fractionation. It is an innovative biomass pretreatment technology.
“CELF uses tetrahydrofuran or THF to supplement water and dilute acid during biomass pretreatment. It improves overall efficiency and adds lignin extraction capabilities,” ... “Best of all, THF itself can be made from biomass sugars.” ..."
From the 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."
Inexpensive, carbon-neutral biofuels are finally possible (UC Riverside)
Fig. 1 Simplified diagram for the proposed CELF-based biorefineries outlining the mass integration strategy. CELF: co-solvent enhanced lignocellulosic fractionation.
No comments:
Post a Comment