(647a) New Pretreatment Method For Biofuels Production From Lignocellulosic Biomass

The technologies to convert lignocellulosic biomass into biofuels are rapidly evolving as a means to decrease dependence on fossil oil, reduce air pollution, and relieve the global warming phenomenon. A new pretreatment method was firstly proposed in this study for biofuels production from lignocellulosics. The concept of this pretreatment is to use a new developed carbohydrates dissolving method to slightly remove hemicelluloses and cellulose in lignocellulosic materials, disrupt the connections between hemicelluloses, cellulose and lignin, and alter the structure of treated biomass to make cellulose more accessible to the enzymes. We found that by partially removing hemicelluloses and cellulose, the wood chips were defibrated easily, and porous fibers and wood fiber particles were generated, which allows for hydrolytic enzymes to easily penetrate and hydrolyze the wood fibers, thus overcoming the key hurdle to the kinetics barrier of biological hydrolysis of lignocellulosics. In principal, the pretreatment method proposed in this study can be used for many kinds of lignocellulosic materials such as, wood, wastepaper, corn stover, rice straw, and switchgrass for biofuels production. It should be noted that this new pretreatment technology is effective for softwood species which the most current technologies could not hydrolyze efficiently. Therefore, the proposed technology provides a potential technique for biofuels production using abundant softwood species.