Production of Biobased Products with Biomass Processing Modules

Opportunity The United State’s natural resource base of soils and climate has made it one of world’s leading producers of food crops. Its resource base also has the potential to grow large quantities of biomass for the manufacture of biobased products, as demonstrated by the fact that the U.S. is the world’s leading manufacturer of grainbased ethanol. To fully develop this potential, manufacturing technologies will have to be developed that (1) utilize cellulosic feedstocks, like wood, cornstover, and switchgrass, and (2) allow for distributed processing of these feedstocks into biofuels. Currently, the manufacture of biofuels depends too heavily on crops that are also used in food production. Although the national resource base of cellulosic biomass is estimated to be in excess of one billion tons annually, it is bulky and highly distributed across the countryside, complicating its collection and delivery to processing facilities. Thus, advanced biofuels production would benefit from technologies that could be widely deployed at relatively small scales, processing as little as 50-200 tons per day (tpd) compared to today’s corn ethanol plants (2,000 tpd) and petroleum refineries (>10,000 tpd).