This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project develops a pretreatment process for biomass that will be used as feedstock for making biofuels, thereby solving a significant problem in this process. Before plant and tree material (biomass) can be used to produce biofuels, or biochemical building blocks for plastics, it must be pretreated to release the targeted components. This pretreatment step is a significant barrier to the development of cost-effective "biorefineries" that would convert biomass, including agricultural residues not currently being utilized, into biofuels and value-added biochemicals. Instead of the conventional approach, where complex biomass is broken down into small components for later processing into alcohol or reassembly into complex chemicals, this new approach directly converts the various components of the biomass into biofuels and biochemcials. This results in a much less costly process. The first step is to remove components from the "backbone" of the biomass and process them into biofuels and biochemicals with enzymes specifically developed to perform these tasks. This step not only produces products, but also makes it easier for another set of enzymes to extract larger components of the biomass "backbone" for processing into biochemicals. This process continues until the backbone is completely disassembled and all the available components were processed. At the end, the remaining sugars are fermented to ethanol.
The broader impact of this project is to significantly enable the US to meet the goal of reducing petroleum imports by 60 percent before 2025 by developing technology that makes the agricultural biorefinery economically sustainable.
