Sunday, May 3, 2009
3-91
A novel pre-treatment method for the lignocellulose-to-ethanol route
Niklas von Weymarn, VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, P.O. Box 1000, FIN-02044 VTT, Espoo, Finland
Production of cellulosic ethanol is still facing some key hurdles on its way to commercial success. A major hurdle, in regard to the actual ethanol production process, is finding an efficient and inexpensive way to hydrolyze the cellulose and hemicellulose polymers into fermentable sugars (monomers). The two main routes to enable this are acid and enzyme-aided hydrolysis. The latter route is inefficient as such, but can be improved significantly by pre-treating the raw material before the actual enzymatic process step. In this paper, we describe a novel pre-treatment method, which is based on the use of a metal catalyst at alkaline conditions. The novel catalytic wet oxidation method showed especially promising effects, when using wood as the raw material. The paper will discuss both scientific and economic aspects of the new pre-treatment method.