Deconstruction and saccharification of lignocellulosic biomass to soluble sugars is a crucial step for cellulosic biorefineries to produce renewable chemicals and fuels. While significant improvement has been made in upgrading sugars to high value specialty and commodity bioproducts including aromatics via furan intermediates, efficient and economic pathways to produce sugars from lignocellulosic biomass remains a critical challenge. Currently cellulosic biorefineries employ a pretreatment step to make lignocellulose carbohydrates (cellulose, hemicellulose) amenable to saccharify. The pretreatment step, employing acid, alkali and steam explosion, is expensive and imparts potentially hazardous effects on the environment. The separation of soluble sugars from homogeneous hydrolysates is another challenge<br/><br/>To overcome the aforementioned challenges, we developed a novel and innovative process to convert intact lignocellulosic biomass to soluble sugars without the need for a pretreatment step. This process, using an inorganic salt solution and less amount of water than the conventional enzymatic saccharification, yields up to 95% theoretical glucose and xylose from intact lignocellulose in one-step. We have further integrated the saccharification process with a downstream step to address the separation concern of soluble sugars from homogeneous hydrolysates. Initial techno-economic analysis suggests that our process, enabling one-step sugar production and separation at low temperature, can improve process economics for cellulosic biorefineries.

Process integration for cellulosic biorefineries

254th National Meeting (2017)

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