Fossil fuels provide 85% of the energy consumed in the United States. The energy content of liquid hydrocarbon fuels makes them the current preferred energy source for all modes of transportation, and the US transportation sector consumes ~13.8 million barrels of oil per day. Lignocellulosic biomass has the potential to serve as a viable source of renewable carbon to produce biofuels and renewable chemicals that could displace some of the petroleum currently used. The DOE-funded Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) is a partnership between seven leading US research institutions (Lawrence Berkeley Lab, Sandia Labs, Lawrence Livermore Lab, Pacific Northwest National Lab, UC-Berkeley, UC-Davis, and the Carnegie Institute for Science) that is focused on the production of infrastructure compatible biofuels and renewable chemicals from these bioenergy crops. The development of cost-effective and energy-efficient processes to transform cellulose and hemicellulose in biomass into fuels is hampered by significant roadblocks, including the lack of specifically developed bioenergy crops, the difficulty in separating biomass components, low activity of enzymes used to hydrolyze polysaccharides, and the inhibitory effect of fuels and processing byproducts on the organisms responsible for producing fuels from monomeric sugars. This presentation will highlight the research efforts underway at JBEI to overcome these obstacles, with a focus on the development of an affordable and scalable ionic liquid-based conversion technology for the efficient production of high yields of fermentable sugars from biomass. Ionic liquids (ILs), solvents composed entirely of paired ions. Imidazolium-based ILs show remarkable abilities to dissolve biomass, but are relatively toxic to the enzymes and microbes used in the biomass conversion process. We have developed renewable ILs that are biocompatible with downstream enzymes and microbes. The envisioned integrated biomass conversion technology will be able to process a wide range of bioenergy crops and achieve high titers of advanced biofuels and renewable chemicals.<br/>

Driving the future: The development of advanced biomass conversion technologies at the Joint BioEnergy Institute

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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