Somethin’ from just about nothin’: The Digest 2018 Multi-Slide Guide to upgrading biorefinery waste lignin into bioplastics

You know what they say, “you can make anything you want from lignin except money.”

It’s the most challenging issues in biofuel production: upgrading the lignin-containing biorefineryresidues to fungible bioproducts, in an affordable, effective, scalable way. The US Department of Energy is supporting a project to develop a viable bioprocess to convert biorefinerywaste to bioplastics at less than $5 dollar/Kg. If successful, the technology would overcome a key challenges for biorefinery cost-effectiveness and sustainability and drive down cellulosic biofuels cost toward $3/GGE.

Principal investigator Joshua S. Yuan of Texas A&M and team prepared this illuminating overview of the project’s promise and progress, presented at the DOE Project Peer Review meetings.