For a transition to a sustainable society, fuels, chemicals, and materials should be produced from renewable resources. Lignocellulosic biomass constitutes an abundant and renewable feedstock; however, its successful application in a biorefinery requires efficient fractionation into its components; cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin. Here, we demonstrate that a newly established hybrid organosolv – steam explosion pretreatment can effectively fractionate spruce biomass to yield pretreated solids with high cellulose (72% w/w) and low lignin (delignification up to 79.4% w/w) content. The cellulose-rich pretreated solids present high saccharification yields (up to 61% w/w) making them ideal for subsequent bioconversion processes. Moreover, under high-gravity conditions (22% w/w) we obtained an ethanol titer of 61.7 g/L, the highest so far reported for spruce biomass. Finally, the obtained high-purity lignin is suitable for various advanced applications. In conclusion, hybrid organosolv pretreatment could offer a closed-loop biorefinery while simultaneously adding value to all biomass components.

Background

The main role of pretreatment is to reduce the natural biomass recalcitrance and thus enhance saccharification yield. A further prerequisite for efficient utilization of all biomass components is their efficient fractionation into well-defined process streams. Currently available pretreatment methods only partially fulfill these criteria. Steam explosion, for example, excels as a pretreatment method but has limited potential for fractionation, whereas organosolv is excellent for delignification but offers poor biomass deconstruction.

Results

In this article, a hybrid method combining the cooking and fractionation of conventional organosolv pretreatment with the implementation of an explosive discharge of the cooking mixture at the end of pretreatment was developed. The effects of various pretreatment parameters (ethanol content, duration, and addition of sulfuric acid) were evaluated. Pretreatment of birch at 200 °C with 60% v/v ethanol and 1% w/w_biomass H₂SO₄ was proven to be the most efficient pretreatment condition yielding pretreated solids with 77.9% w/w cellulose, 8.9% w/w hemicellulose, and 7.0 w/w lignin content. Under these conditions, high delignification of 86.2% was demonstrated. The recovered lignin was of high purity, with cellulose and hemicellulose contents not exceeding 0.31 and 3.25% w/w, respectively, and ash to be < 0.17% w/w in all cases, making it suitable for various applications. The pretreated solids presented high saccharification yields, reaching 68% at low enzyme load (6 FPU/g) and complete saccharification at high enzyme load (22.5 FPU/g). Finally, simultaneous saccharification and fermentation (SSF) at 20% w/w solids yielded an ethanol titer of 80 g/L after 192 h, corresponding to 90% of the theoretical maximum.

Conclusions

The novel hybrid method developed in this study allowed for the efficient fractionation of birch biomass and production of pretreated solids with high cellulose and low lignin contents. Moreover, the explosive discharge at the end of pretreatment had a positive effect on enzymatic saccharification, resulting in high hydrolyzability of the pretreated solids and elevated ethanol titers in the following high-gravity SSF. To the best of our knowledge, the ethanol concentration obtained with this method is the highest so far for birch biomass.