(190k) Production of Bioethanol from Lignocellulosic Biomass in Mexico: Evaluation on Technical Potential and the Analysis of Two Biorefinery Configurations

As residual crop, lignocellulosic biomass is an important resource for biofuel production. Mexico occupies the third place in terms of cropland in Latinamerica (Valdez-Vazquez et al., 2010). Agricultural residues, in particular, become an important source for biofuel production.

The agricultural residue approach avoids high capital and operating costs as it could be considering other possibilities. In Mexico, the most important cultivars are wheat, maize, sorghum and barley.

In the first part of the work, an historical data analysis through the last ten years (2005-2014) of the agricultural residue production in Mexico was carried out. The amount of residues per cultivar per year was estimated and the theoretical, sustainable and technical potentials were calculated per year and as total through the ten years. As a result, the most productive residues regions are identified and, therefore, the specific locations for bioethanol production are suggested.

The development of new engineering processes and appropriate technologies represent a wide field of opportunities. Sánchez et al. (2013) reported that 500 ton/day is the minimal plant capacity to guarantee profitability for producing bioethanol in a biorefinery from agroresidues.

Thus, in the second part of this study the real production of residual crops in terms of the yield (residue-to-product ratio, total cultivated area and high heating value) was determined. Moreover, the evaluation of biomass processing (e.g. bioethanol production) ought to be revised with the central objective of minimize the energy consumption.

In this context, we present the analysis of several residual crops using two biorefiney configurations: conventional biochemical platform (CBP) (Sánchez et al., 2013) that use fungal polysaccharides hydrolase enzymes and consolidated bioprocess (CB) (Lynd et al., 2005) that use bacteria that possess an enzyme to hydrolyze biomass. Both processes transform the resulting sugars in bioethanol; nevertheless, CBP needs to produce enzymes in a dedicated reactor and CB produces enzyme in the same reactor involving. Finally, a thermodynamic analysis in exergy terms has been developed for both schemes in order to compare the efficiency of energy use (Marmolejo-Correa and Molina, 2015; Marmolejo-Correa et al., 2016).

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