I feel that bioethanol cannot be produced from lignocellulosic biomass economically due to certain technical barriers like costs involved in pretreatment (size reduction) & cellulase and poor fermentation yield.
Thanks for the clarification. But the planners and researchers in India and aroud the world are aiming high and investing heavily in research in this area. We may strenghten the bioethanol production from first gen. feedstock such as sugarcane molasses, sweet sorghum juices, or broken grains in India, where infrastructure is already in place.
It is right that currently it is not that economical. But it might be noted that lignocellulosic biomass is the most abundant renewable resource throughout the world and it has the potential to supply enough of potent monomeric sugar residues for alcohol fermentation. As S. Rao sir has noted that planners and researchers throughout the world has been looking for an alternative energy source, lignocellulosic biomass holds the answer for tomorrow's sustainable energy.
My query: Whether genetically modified microbes for enhanced activity in biofuel production is allowed to be industrially used in India.. or is it still in the lab like transgenic plants, If it is allowed is there any mandate for this? Kindly let me know
According to my view, biochemical ethanol production using hydrolysis and fermentation process from lignocellulosic waste is economically unfeasible unless consolidate bioprocessing (CBP) is used. Finding a single organism which can do hydrolysis and fermentation is still at research scale .Clostridium thermocellulyticum is one of the potent microbes but since it is obligate anaerobe it cannot replace the simplicity and efficieny of fermentation as that of yeast. The more feasible route using lignocellulosic waste is it conversion to syngas and than fermentation to ethanol using microbes (thermochemical route). Internationally there are many commercially based company working on both the route of ethanol production. For locally based lignocellulosic based feedstock, small gasifier and fermenter can be put up for local ethanol production.
yes sir, the awarness among people is lacking and so is the applicability of research in India to a commerical scale is not done.
"Hans van Leeuwen" from Iowa university is one of the best in this subject. look him up.
No single process of producing bio-ethanol is not without a disadvantage, even the now celebrated consolidated bio-processing is thought to produce low ethanol yield. The catabolic repression of enzyme activity in a single integrated process by the same organism, the di-auxic phenomenon of hexose and pentose utilization, the preferential utilization of six carbon sugar for growth at the expense of recalcitrant lignocellulose by the anaerobic organisms are some of the issues that are thought to affect the CBP. I thing, in my opinion, the best approach at present, despite the risk and concerns, is the use of engineer organism which simultaneouslycarries out all these processes leading to efficient bio-ethanol production
Considering the present challenges facing lignocellulosic ethanol, this might make us think that it is not commercially feasible yet, on the other hand there are several advances that have really reduce the cost of ethanol production from lignocellulosic biomass. There are novel enzymes that easily hydrolyse lignocellulosic materials in few days with a good yield of monomeric sugars and also there are several robust yeast strains for both hexose and pentose fermentations available nowadays. Moreover, lignocellulosic biomass are cheap and readily available feedstocks. Hopefully there will be a better and more economically viable lignocellulosic ethanol production with recent advances in the hydrolysis and fermentation processes.
The use of biofuels has been proposed as a solution to both climate change and fossil fuels depletion problems since bio-fuels are considered as CO2 neutral and can be produced from recyclable and abundant materials. This has led to a big growth of biofuels production systems in the recent years.
Various bio-ethanol production systems, using lignocellulosic agricultural wastes are amongst them, although their poor economics compared to systems producing fossil fuels constitute a major problem. The U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has investigated the complete process design and economics of such a system and proposed a plant where bio-ethanol is produced by fermentation of such sugars that are contained in corn stover biomass and the remaining lignin is burnt for power generation. This is a novel production technology and is considered as the state of the art . Examples of bio-ethanol industrial scale plants using similar technology include the DuPont cellulosic ethanol facility at Nevada (ttp://biofuels.dupont.com/cellulosic-ethanol/nevada-site-ce-facility) and the Iowa cellulosic ethanol plant of POET-DSM (http://poet-dsm.com).
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