Sources of Biomass Feedstock Variability and the Potential Impact on Biofuels Production

C Luke Williams,Tyler L Westover,Rachel M Emerson,Jaya Shankar Tumuluru,Chenlin Li

doi:10.1007/s12155-015-9694-y

C Luke Williams, Tyler L Westover + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1007/s12155-015-9694-y

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Journal: BioEnergy Research	Publication Date: Nov 23, 2015
Citations: 219	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Idaho National Laboratory

Abstract

Terrestrial lignocellulosic biomass has the potential to be a carbon neutral and domestic source of fuels and chemicals. However, the innate variability of biomass resources, such as herbaceous and woody materials, and the inconsistency within a single resource due to disparate growth and harvesting conditions, presents challenges for downstream processes which often require materials that are physically and chemically consistent. Intrinsic biomass characteristics, including moisture content, carbohydrate and ash compositions, bulk density, and particle size/shape distributions are highly variable and can impact the economics of transforming biomass into value-added products. For instance, ash content increases by an order of magnitude between woody and herbaceous feedstocks (from ∼0.5 to 5 %, respectively) while lignin content drops by a factor of two (from ∼30 to 15 %, respectively). This increase in ash and reduction in lignin leads to biofuel conversion consequences, such as reduced pyrolysis oil yields for herbaceous products as compared to woody material. In this review, the sources of variability for key biomass characteristics are presented for multiple types of biomass. Additionally, this review investigates the major impacts of the variability in biomass composition on four conversion processes: fermentation, hydrothermal liquefaction, pyrolysis, and direct combustion. Finally, future research processes aimed at reducing the detrimental impacts of biomass variability on conversion to fuels and chemicals are proposed. © 2015 Battelle Energy Alliance, LLC, contract manager for Idaho National Laboratory.

Highlights

Biomass is poised to make significant contributions to the domestic and carbon neutral production of fuels and chemicals
This review briefly summarizes the primary impacts that feedstock properties have on major conversion options
Utilizing hydrothermal liquefaction as a conversion process provides at least two advantages: the aqueous reaction media allows for a wide variety of feedstocks, regardless of initial moisture content and reactions are fairly independent of particle size given the high heat transfer rates in hydrothermal media [17]

Summary

Introduction

Biomass is poised to make significant contributions to the domestic and carbon neutral production of fuels and chemicals. Many factors contribute to biomass compositional variability, and this variation can have a significant impact on the conversion of biomass to value-added products These problems could be mitigated through selection of pretreatments, conversion processes, or by blending different types of biomass to diminish detrimental effects, e.g., reduce the effective ash content of herbaceous materials by blending them with woody biomass. Utilizing hydrothermal liquefaction as a conversion process provides at least two advantages: the aqueous reaction media allows for a wide variety of feedstocks, regardless of initial moisture content (even marine biomass with up to 90 % water) and reactions are fairly independent of particle size given the high heat transfer rates in hydrothermal media [17] These facts make HTL well suited for a diverse array of feedstocks. The same processes that enable high value co-products could reduce feedstock variability by separating feed streams according to chemical composition

Conclusions

Findings

Compliance with ethical standards