Co‐solvent Pretreatment Reduces Costly Enzyme Requirements for High Sugar and Ethanol Yields from Lignocellulosic Biomass

Abstract

We introduce a new pretreatment called co‐solvent‐enhanced lignocellulosic fractionation (CELF) to reduce enzyme costs dramatically for high sugar yields from hemicellulose and cellulose, which is essential for the low‐cost conversion of biomass to fuels. CELF employs THF miscible with aqueous dilute acid to obtain up to 95 % theoretical yield of glucose, xylose, and arabinose from corn stover even if coupled with enzymatic hydrolysis at only 2 mg enzyme g glucan−1. The unusually high saccharification with such low enzyme loadings can be attributed to a very high lignin removal, which is supported by compositional analysis, fractal kinetic modeling, and SEM imaging. Subsequently, nearly pure lignin product can be precipitated by the evaporation of volatile THF for recovery and recycling. Simultaneous saccharification and fermentation of CELF‐pretreated solids with low enzyme loadings and Saccharomyces cerevisiae produced twice as much ethanol as that from dilute‐acid‐pretreated solids if both were optimized for corn stover.