Corinne Scown (@cdscown.bsky.social)

Another @jbei.lbl.gov publication hot off the presses! 7 herbaceous, 9 woody, 4 food processing residues, and 2 blends all decontructed using butylamine. We can hit $1.3 to 6.1/kg sugar now, process intensification needed to hit $0.45–0.79/kg. pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

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Cost of Deconstruction Depots for Diversified, Waste-Based Lignocellulosic Sugars Using Distillable Solvents Transitioning to a bioeconomy that makes use of low-emission and waste feedstocks requires greater flexibility to accommodate seasonal variations and mitigate long-term storage challenges, such as material loss and fire risk. To achieve this goal, biomass deconstruction technologies must efficiently handle diverse feedstocks. Here, we assess the cost of using butylamine─a distillable solvent─to deconstruct 22 different biomass feedstocks: 7 herbaceous, 9 woody, 4 food processing residues, and 2 blends. Lignocellulosic sugar production costs, based on current empirical data, range from $1.3 to 6.1/kg, suggesting that substantial improvements are required to compete with conventional sugars. The high solvent loading (850 g/kg of whole slurry) is a process bottleneck. Lowering the solvent loading to 59 g/kg of whole slurry, demonstrated in an L-scale reactor using poplar biomass, reduces the minimum sugar selling price by 33%. Solvent loading and recovery, solid loading, sugar yield, enzyme use, and delivered biomass cost all play key roles in reaching sugar production costs of $0.45–0.79/kg. Strategic feedstock blending to maximize carbohydrate content, process optimization to improve conversion efficiency, and the selection of low-cost feedstocks are important to advancing feedstock-flexible biorefineries. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acssuschemeng.5c05029