There has been increasing interest in the conversion of biomass to fuel grade ethanol in the recent years due to the need for minimizing oil imports in a period of increasing global oil consumption, the need for a renewable source of fuels, the need for minimizing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions caused by the use of fossil fuel, and political pressures. Biorefineries for conversion of biomass to ethanol can be categorized into three types: corn-to-ethanol, basic lignocellulosic with ethanol the primary product and integrated lignocellulosic with a variety other co-products.  The lignocellulosic biorefinery includes the concept of forest biorefinery.

In order for future biorefineries to be successful, it is crucial to pre-extract as many value-added co-products as possible using highly efficient separation methods. In this presentation, a critical review of variety of separation methods and technologies related to biorefining will be presented including pre-extraction of hemicelluloses and conversion to other value-added chemicals, ethanol product separation and dehydration, and detoxification of fermentation hydrolyzates. This review suggests that extractive distillation with ionic liquids and hyperbranched polymers, adsorption with molecular sieve and bio-based adsorbents, and three specific hybrid methods are potentially significant separation methods especially suitable for future biorefineries.  The hybrid methods couple separation and fermentation and include extractive-fermentation, a membrane pervaporation-bioreactor, and a vacuum membrane distillation (VMD)¨Cbioreactor.