Researchers of University of Wisconsin-Madison have developed a for
creating a concentrated stream of sugars using a plant derived chemical, which
has future scope for biofuels. Project was funded by the National Science Foundation and the
U.S. Department of Energy's Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC). They
used gamma valerolactone, or GVL, to deconstruct plants and produce sugars that
can be chemically or biologically upgraded into biofuels. Later this year, with
support from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), the team will
begin scaling up the process.
Since GVL is created from the plant source, it is renewable as well as more affordable than
conversion methods requiring expensive chemicals or enzymes. The process also
converts 85 to 95 percent of the starting material to sugars that can be fed to
yeast for fermentation into ethanol, or chemically upgraded furans to create
drop-in biofuels. Jeremy Luterbacher, a UW-Madison postdoctoral researcher and
the paper's lead author demonstrated the economic viability of this advance by
concentrating the sugar, removing the GVL for reuse, and showing that yeast
could successfully generate ethanol from the sugar stream. This procedure is
easily done and is low energy separation step. Luterbacher cleared that they weren't
producing some weird chemical byproducts that would kill the yeast, and that we
were taking out enough GVL to make it nontoxic, By feeding the resulting sugar
solution to microorganisms. Further he clears that additives like liquid carbon
dioxide ,can be used to make solution separate like oil and vinegar. As liquid carbon
dioxide is green, nontoxic and can be removed by simple depressurization once
you want GVL and solutions of sugar to mix again, it is claimed to be a perfect
additive.
Initial economic assessment of the process indicates that the technology could manufacture
ethanol at a cost savings of roughly 10 percent when compared with current
state-of-the-art technologies.
Work on production of GVL from biomass and the use of GVL
as a solvent for the conversion of biomass to furan chemicals was being
conducted for several years by James Dumesic, Steenbock Professor and Michel
Boudart Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering at UW-Madison, and his
research group.
Now, Under the Accelerator Program effort, Dumesic
will serve as principal investigator for an 18-month project involving
construction of a high-efficiency biomass reactor. The reactor will use GVL to
produce concentrated streams of high-value sugars and intact lignin solids.
