Lin Luo, Gjalt Huppes, and Ester van der Voet. Industrial Ecology, Center of Environmental Sciences (CML), Leiden University, P.O.Box 9518, Leiden, 2300 RA, Netherlands
Among the potential large-scale industrial biorefineries, lignocellulosic feedstock (LCF) biorefinery will most probably be pushed through with the highest success. This study focused on a LCF biorefinery, which integrates biomass conversion processes and equipments to process power, fuels and chemicals. Collected agricultural residues such as corn stover, wheat straw or sugarcane bagasse undergo pretreatment, fermentation and purification to produce ethanol together with organic acids like succinic acid and acetic acid. The advantages of cellulosic feedstocks include a much higher ultimate supply, lower purchase cost, potential reduction of energy input and GHG emissions, and avoidance of competition with food and arable land. By producing multiple products and integrating waste treatment, the biorefinery complex has maximized the values derived from cellulosic feedstocks.
The aim of this study is to quantify the environmental performances of a designed LCF biorefinery mainly focusing on energy use and GHG emissions. The biorefinery is designed using (bio)chemical engineering knowledge and process simulation tools like ASPEN and SuperPro, and then the system is analyzed using LCA tools. Once the designed biorefinery is analyzed successfully, the model system can be expanded to a product-nonspecific framework, in which different production pathways in biorefining are evaluated in order to measure and minimize the energy consumption and GHG emissions. Such a framework provides the opportunities to bridging technical process and product design and environmental analysis, manipulating process and product options to achieve an optimized design, and optimizing biorefineries in terms of technologies, energy efficiency and environmental performances.
