To cut the cost of biofuels, their production-process can be enhanced to include additional valuable biochemical compounds. A recent experimental study focuses on one source of biomass: residues from Brazilian palm oil production.
Biofuels still have a long way to go to become sustainable substitutes for fossil fuels. A number of social and environmental hurdles have to be overcome, and crucially, their price has to come down to make them competitive. One way to make the overall process economically viable would be to process the biomass in biorefineries and transform it into additional high value chemicals for the chemical industry. Publishing in the journal Industrial Crops and Products, researchers from EPFL present how one such source of biomass, agricultural residues from Brazilian oil palm plantations, can be used to produce bioethanol and two additional end products: furfural, a much-used industrial compound, and lignin, a solid fuel that can be used in the biorefinery.
Oil palm dates grow in bunches, which are harvested and pressed to extract oil, which is currently used for cooking, cosmetics, and the production of biodiesel, among others. The left over fibrous residues are typically discarded as waste. But as Edgard Gnansounou and Jegannathan Kenthorai Raman from EPFL's Bioenergy and Energy Planning Research Group (BPE) explain, the empty fruit bunches are far from worthless. "You can make at least 30 valuable biochemical compounds using residues from palm oil production," they say.
So are empty palm oil fruit bunches a sustainable source of biomass? And if so, what types of compounds should they be transformed into? These are the kinds of questions that Gnansounou and Kenthorai seek to address in their research. For this particular study, they characterized the composition of the empty fruit bunches and optimized the chemical processes for their transformation. These data will feed into an assessment of the environmental impact and economic cost that such a biorefinery would have.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-08-farm-residues-biofuels.html#jCp
Oil palm dates grow in bunches, which are harvested and pressed to extract oil, which is currently used for cooking, cosmetics, and the production of biodiesel, among others. The left over fibrous residues are typically discarded as waste. But as Edgard Gnansounou and Jegannathan Kenthorai Raman from EPFL's Bioenergy and Energy Planning Research Group (BPE) explain, the empty fruit bunches are far from worthless. "You can make at least 30 valuable biochemical compounds using residues from palm oil production," they say.
So are empty palm oil fruit bunches a sustainable source of biomass? And if so, what types of compounds should they be transformed into? These are the kinds of questions that Gnansounou and Kenthorai seek to address in their research. For this particular study, they characterized the composition of the empty fruit bunches and optimized the chemical processes for their transformation. These data will feed into an assessment of the environmental impact and economic cost that such a biorefinery would have.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-08-farm-residues-biofuels.html#jCp
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