15. Integrating technologies for a depot-based feedstock development

摘要

Large scale integrated bio-refinery might not achieve economies of scale since the cost of feedstock transportation increases with the scale resulting from larger supply radius. It is widely envisioned that an array of distributed depot-style facilities located at the biomass resources to remove unwanted components of biomass and convert useful components into consistent on-spec feedstock would facilitate transportation, handling, storage, transaction, and subsequent conversion. These unwanted components could be ash, lignin, or hemicellulose. However, there is not a consensus about what kind of format of this “on-spec feedstock” could be. They could be wood chips, pellets, briquettes, panels, pretreated solids (in various formats), molasses, or granular cellulosic sugars. What follows is depending on availability of cost-effective technologies and systems for a distributive depot system. Mechanical, thermal, and chemical processes can be employed to upgrade the physical and/or chemical characteristics of harvested biomass. Accordingly, these facilities can be classified as solid depot and liquid depot based on if solvents are presented in the production and product formats. We have shaped the vision that a depot would (a) use no chemicals and employ simple equipment and procedures and (b) be versatile blending a broad spectrum of feedstocks into a consistent format. Currently, we focus on developing cost-effective pro-conversion processes, customizing voluminous biomass to specifications, formulating value-added feedstock commodities, evaluating the effects of pre-conversion on downstream conversion performance in producing biofuels, biopower and bioproducts, and analyzing process economics. Physical and chemical changes of biomass under different processing stages have been investigated with a full suite of materials characterization tools.