Saccharification of lignocellulosic biomass for bioethanol production with special emphasis on short rotation trees, forest hardwoods, and cascade used wood panels

Bioethanol, the most relevant liquid biofuel, has been produced by fermentation of sugars derived from annual crops. Production from non-food materials, like fast growing trees and forest wood waste instead would be energetically more favourable with the further advantage of not influencing food and feed production. Today’s wood to bioethanol conversion is still struggling with respect to energy and product efficiency. Developing and biochemically optimizing a low energy consuming saccharification process chain (SPC) for the production of bioethanol from lignocellulosic biomass is the focus of this PhD thesis. An acetosolv pretreatment process provided a basis to build upon. This procedure can defibrillate the wood cell wall structure at moderate temperatures and ambient pressure in a way that the cellulose is highly preserved in the solids. Product efficient enzymatic hydrolysis makes the developed SPC a promising technology. As a result, more than 75% of the original wood sources, being poplar, willow and beech, were detected as potentially usable products from the investigated process chain: Glucose for the production of bioethanol and furfural and lignin as value-added co-products. Resources under investigation were poplar and willow trees from short rotation forestry, beech and spruce as German main forest tree species, wheat straw as an agricultural residue and cascade used wood composite panels.