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Multi-product biorefineries from lignocelluloses: a pathway to revitalisation of the sugar industry?

BACKGROUND: Driven by a range of sustainability challenges, e.g. climate change, resource depletion and expanding populations, a circular bioeconomy is emerging and expected to evolve progressively in the coming decades. South Africa along with other BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China)...

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Autores principales: Farzad, Somayeh, Mandegari, Mohsen Ali, Guo, Miao, Haigh, Kathleen F., Shah, Nilay, Görgens, Johann F.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2017
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5387292/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28400858
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13068-017-0761-9
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author Farzad, Somayeh
Mandegari, Mohsen Ali
Guo, Miao
Haigh, Kathleen F.
Shah, Nilay
Görgens, Johann F.
author_facet Farzad, Somayeh
Mandegari, Mohsen Ali
Guo, Miao
Haigh, Kathleen F.
Shah, Nilay
Görgens, Johann F.
author_sort Farzad, Somayeh
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Driven by a range of sustainability challenges, e.g. climate change, resource depletion and expanding populations, a circular bioeconomy is emerging and expected to evolve progressively in the coming decades. South Africa along with other BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) represents the emerging bioeconomy and contributes significantly to global sugar market. In our research, South Africa is used as a case study to demonstrate the sustainable design for the future biorefineries annexed to existing sugar industry. Detailed techno-economic evaluation and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) were applied to model alternative routes for converting sugarcane residues (bagasse and trash) to selected biofuel and/or biochemicals (ethanol, ethanol and lactic acid, ethanol and furfural, butanol, methanol and Fischer–Tropsch synthesis, with co-production of surplus electricity) in an energy self-sufficient biorefinery system. RESULTS: Economic assessment indicated that methanol synthesis with an internal rate of return (IRR) of 16.7% and ethanol–lactic acid co-production (20.5%) met the minimum investment criteria of 15%, while the latter had the lowest sensitivity to market price amongst all the scenarios. LCA results demonstrated that sugarcane cultivation was the most significant contributor to environmental impacts in all of the scenarios, other than the furfural production scenario in which a key step, a biphasic process with tetrahydrofuran solvent, had the most significant contribution. CONCLUSION: Overall, the thermochemical routes presented environmental advantages over biochemical pathways on most of the impact categories, except for acidification and eutrophication. Of the investigated scenarios, furfural production delivered the inferior environmental performance, while methanol production performed best due to its low reagent consumption. The combined techno-economic and environmental assessments identified the performance-limiting steps in the 2G biorefinery design for sugarcane industry and highlighted the technology development opportunities under circular bioeconomy context. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13068-017-0761-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorised users.
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spelling pubmed-53872922017-04-11 Multi-product biorefineries from lignocelluloses: a pathway to revitalisation of the sugar industry? Farzad, Somayeh Mandegari, Mohsen Ali Guo, Miao Haigh, Kathleen F. Shah, Nilay Görgens, Johann F. Biotechnol Biofuels Research BACKGROUND: Driven by a range of sustainability challenges, e.g. climate change, resource depletion and expanding populations, a circular bioeconomy is emerging and expected to evolve progressively in the coming decades. South Africa along with other BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) represents the emerging bioeconomy and contributes significantly to global sugar market. In our research, South Africa is used as a case study to demonstrate the sustainable design for the future biorefineries annexed to existing sugar industry. Detailed techno-economic evaluation and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) were applied to model alternative routes for converting sugarcane residues (bagasse and trash) to selected biofuel and/or biochemicals (ethanol, ethanol and lactic acid, ethanol and furfural, butanol, methanol and Fischer–Tropsch synthesis, with co-production of surplus electricity) in an energy self-sufficient biorefinery system. RESULTS: Economic assessment indicated that methanol synthesis with an internal rate of return (IRR) of 16.7% and ethanol–lactic acid co-production (20.5%) met the minimum investment criteria of 15%, while the latter had the lowest sensitivity to market price amongst all the scenarios. LCA results demonstrated that sugarcane cultivation was the most significant contributor to environmental impacts in all of the scenarios, other than the furfural production scenario in which a key step, a biphasic process with tetrahydrofuran solvent, had the most significant contribution. CONCLUSION: Overall, the thermochemical routes presented environmental advantages over biochemical pathways on most of the impact categories, except for acidification and eutrophication. Of the investigated scenarios, furfural production delivered the inferior environmental performance, while methanol production performed best due to its low reagent consumption. The combined techno-economic and environmental assessments identified the performance-limiting steps in the 2G biorefinery design for sugarcane industry and highlighted the technology development opportunities under circular bioeconomy context. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13068-017-0761-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorised users. BioMed Central 2017-04-11 /pmc/articles/PMC5387292/ /pubmed/28400858 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13068-017-0761-9 Text en © The Author(s) 2017 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
spellingShingle Research
Farzad, Somayeh
Mandegari, Mohsen Ali
Guo, Miao
Haigh, Kathleen F.
Shah, Nilay
Görgens, Johann F.
Multi-product biorefineries from lignocelluloses: a pathway to revitalisation of the sugar industry?
title Multi-product biorefineries from lignocelluloses: a pathway to revitalisation of the sugar industry?
title_full Multi-product biorefineries from lignocelluloses: a pathway to revitalisation of the sugar industry?
title_fullStr Multi-product biorefineries from lignocelluloses: a pathway to revitalisation of the sugar industry?
title_full_unstemmed Multi-product biorefineries from lignocelluloses: a pathway to revitalisation of the sugar industry?
title_short Multi-product biorefineries from lignocelluloses: a pathway to revitalisation of the sugar industry?
title_sort multi-product biorefineries from lignocelluloses: a pathway to revitalisation of the sugar industry?
topic Research
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5387292/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28400858
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13068-017-0761-9
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