Ideal biomass characteristics for biofuels and biochemicals production - can we bridge the gap between feedstock growers and users?

Feedstock logistics have not been widely studied by the biofuels community. Harvesting, storage, preprocessing and transportation of biomass can be improved to maximize product yield during the bioconversion process. Recent research has started to bridge the gap between feedstock suppliers and downstream biomass conversion by investigating the influence of particle size, leaf/needle and moisture content of biomass on bioconversion processes. A major gap between feedstock growers and users (bioconversion facility), however, remains. Feedstock growers seek to maximize biomass production per unit hectare of land, while the conversion facility wants to maximize the mass of sugar per tonne of feedstock. With the advent of dedicated feedstocks, these differences in performance objectives will become more significant and need to be addressed. 

The objective of this research to is to assess critical feedstock characteristics for bioconversion processes to help bridge the gap between feedstock growers and users. It will be shown that preprocessing of hybrid polar biomass in terms of particle size, moisture content, and leaf content can improve sugar yield by 20% during conversion. In addition, we will present bioconversion processing data of low and high productivity (tonne/acre/yr) 2-year-old hybrid poplar clones. It was found that the physical and chemical compositions of both clones were similar but that the low productivity clone (4 tonnes/acre/yr), produced 15% more sugars per tonne of biomass after pretreatment and enzymatic hydrolysis compared to high productivity clone (8 tonnes/acre/yr). General strategies to bridge the gap between feedstock growers and conversion facilities will also be presented.