Switchgrass advance: JBEI’s ionic liquid pretreatment, enzymatic hydrolysis scales effectively

In California, researchers from the DOE-Office of Science funded Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), in conjunction with staff from the DOE-Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy funded Advanced Biofuels Process Demonstration Unit at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, published the paper, “Scale-Up and Evaluation of High Solid Ionic Liquid Pretreatment and Enzymatic Hydrolysis of Switchgrass,” in the journal Biotechnology for Biofuels.

This paper, which is the first peer-reviewed literature on this topic, found that the ionic liquid pretreatment process developed at JBEI scales effectively (600-fold, from 0.01 to 6L) with no loss in performance, indicating that there is a path forward to volumes relevant to biorefineries (100-1000L). To learn more, please read the full text article.