7 - Recent technical advancements in first, second and third generation ethanol production

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Abstract

Ethanol is an alternative biofuel produced by a biotechnological process from sucrose-rich crops (e.g., sugarcane, beet, and sweet sorghum). In order to increase the productivity of this alcohol without increasing the cultivated crop area, efforts have been focused on the use of alternative raw materials, such as lignocellulosic residues and microbial sources, called second-generation (2G) and third-generation (3G) ethanol, respectively. However, 2G and 3G production processes are not consolidated, with a lot of bottlenecks. Aiming to overcome them, recent studies have shown that it is possible to reduce the process cost by optimizing and evaluating different alternatives for the critical steps of pretreatment, hydrolysis, and fermentation. In this chapter, after a short introduction about ethanol and its production around the world, the main characteristics, drawbacks, challenges, and perspectives are discussed for the 1G, 2G, and 3G ethanol production processes.

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  • Techno-economic evaluation of second-generation ethanol from sugarcane bagasse: Commercial versus on-site produced enzymes and use of the xylose liquor

    2022, Journal of Cleaner Production
    Citation Excerpt :

    The alternatives of xylose fermentation or biodigestion were also assessed by Longati et al. (2018) and Carpio et al. (2019). More recently, Fonseca et al. (2020) and Hilares et al. (2022) also evaluated the use of the xylose liquor for fermentation and biodigestion processes, respectively. The Bioethanol Laboratory (LaBio, 2019) developed a proprietary technology to obtain an enzyme cocktail able to faster hydrolyze sugarcane bagasse at high solids loads and industrial conditions (Silva et al., 2009, 2016; Espinheira et al., 2022), which is a desired target of the second-generation ethanol industry.

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