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Biochemical and Thermochemical Conversion of Switchgrass to Biofuels

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Switchgrass

Part of the book series: Green Energy and Technology ((GREEN))

Abstract

With dwindling oil reserves and growing environmental concerns, researchers are looking at producing sustainable biofuels and chemicals from renewable resources like switchgrass. Biofuels and biochemicals will be produced in the near future from switchgrass in biorefineries using both biochemical and thermochemical platforms. We have summarized recent literature pertaining to different processing steps within the biochemical platform (pretreatment, enzyme hydrolysis, microbial fermentation, protein extraction) and thermochemical platform (pyrolysis, bio-oil, gasification, combustion, hydrothermal process) in this chapter. Though we have improved our fundamental understanding on the different processing steps to produce biofuels, several challenges still have to be overcome to create a bioeconomy and produce fuels and chemicals from biomass in an economic and sustainable manner.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by U.S. Department of Energy through the DOE Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC) Grant DE‐FC02‐07ER64494. AFEX is a trademark of MBI International. We would like to thank CAFI3 members for allowing us to use some of their data in this chapter. We would also like to thank Nirmal Uppugundla from the Biomass Conversion Research Laboratory (BCRL) at Michigan State University for helping draft some of the figures.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Biomass Conversion Research Lab (BCRL), Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, Michigan State University, 3900 Collins Road, Lansing, 48910, USA

    Venkatesh Balan, Bryan Bals, Shishir Chundawat, Mingjie Jin & Bruce Dale

  2. DOE-Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC), Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA

    Venkatesh Balan, Bryan Bals, Shishir Chundawat, Mingjie Jin & Bruce Dale

  3. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA, 23529, USA

    Sandeep Kumar

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  1. Venkatesh Balan
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Correspondence to Venkatesh Balan .

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  1. , Department of Agroenvironmental Science, University of Bologna, Viale Fanin 44, Bologna, 40127, Italy

    Andrea Monti

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Balan, V., Kumar, S., Bals, B., Chundawat, S., Jin, M., Dale, B. (2012). Biochemical and Thermochemical Conversion of Switchgrass to Biofuels. In: Monti, A. (eds) Switchgrass. Green Energy and Technology. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-2903-5_7

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