Evaluation of sugarcane plants with reduced lignin content for production of sugar, first generation ethanol and electricity

Increased worldwide demand for sustainable energy production has motivated the development of second generation ethanol production from lignocellulosic residues. Sugarcane bagasse may be used as feedstock for ethanol production through pretreatment and hydrolysis, producing fermentable sugars. Genetic engineering and plant breeding approaches are strategies to develop more readily fermentable energy crops. To reduce biomass pretreatment costs and increase cell wall digestion efficiency, modulating lignin content could be an alternative. Recently, a sugarcane breeding program in Brazil has been selecting sugarcane plants with low lignin content and/or altered lignin composition, using a recurrent selection method to increase the frequency of favorable alleles through repeated cycles of crossing and selection. However, this selection also alters the sugar content and productivity in the field.Optimization of the technical parameters of the process along with the economic return are crucial for the development of efficient biorefinery configurations, especially when considering the future integration of second generation ethanol production in the conventional sugarcane processing plant. The Virtual Sugarcane Biorefinery (VSB) is a tool developed by CTBE which integrates all the sugarcane production chain and allows the identification of technical and sustainability impacts of different configurations of biorefineries. In this study, first generation ethanol production from sugarcane plants with low content lignin were investigated, in order to assess the possible impacts of altered composition in first generation ethanol production. Results show that similar outputs are obtained per tonne of sugarcane processed, but different figures when the cultivated area is taken into consideration.