Presenter: J.Y. Zhu, USDA Forest Service, Forest Products Lab
Hosted by: Northwest Advanced Renewables Alliance (NARA)
Biofuel production from woody biomass through the sugar platform
requires efficient production of fermentable sugars either chemically
and enzymatically by hydrolyzing polysaccharides in wood cell walls.
Enzymatic sugar production is a mature technology that can produce high
quality sugars but requires a pre-treatment step to open wood cell wall
structure to improve its accessibility to enzymes, because nature
produces wood as a structural material that is not easily accessible to
most microbes to deconstruct into basic building blocks such as simple
sugars. Unfortunately, pre-treatment is the most expensive step in
biofuel production through enzymatic saccharification and fermentation.
This is especially true for woody biomass due to its high lignin content
and strong physical integrity. Pre-treatment softwood and harvest
softwood forest residue, the feedstock NARA project proposed to use, is
even more difficult. Most existing pre-treatment processes cannot produce
good enzymatic digestibility from softwood. In this webinar, I will
outline the basic principles of pre-treatment, its limitations, and its
effect on downstream co-product development. Especially, I will discuss
the SPORL pre-treatment NARA adopted for bio-jet fuel production, its
versatility, performance, kinetics based process scale-up, and lignin
co-product.
Register for this webinar at https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/6663061726743226370
NARA webinars benefit industry (primary and secondary manufacturers,
chemical, and biofuel), researchers, contractors, land managers,
policymakers, state and local agency personnel, NGOs, educators, and
students – all who are interested and involved in operations converting
forest-based biomass to biofuels and co-products.
Past an future webinars are posted to http://nararenewables.org/features/webinar-series