Low cost sugars and lignin streams: The Digest’s 2017 Multi-Slide Guide to Pretreatment and Process Hydrolysis

According to this presentation deck from NREL’s Melvin Tucker, “to produce high concentration sugar and reactive lignin streams at high yields and low costs from biomass to meet BETO’s 2017 ($5/GGE) and 2022 ($3/GGE) Goals and Targets, the industry needs:

•To reduce enzyme loadings below 10 mg total protein/g cellulose
•High concentration “cleaner” sugar syrups to meet BETO’s MYPP
•Lower toxicity for biological upgrading
•Lower concentrations of catalyst poisons for catalytic upgrading
•Lignin streams for biological/catalytic upgrading
•Provide hyrolyzate slurries to other projects in Biochemical Platform
•Corn stover, blended, and blended/densified feedstocks to meet BETO’s MYTP
•Process scalable to pilot and larger scales
•Re-purpose decommissioned pulp and paper mills

All that and more is covered in this illuminating presentation from Dr. Tucker at the most recent DOE Project Peer Review sessions in Washington DC.