Sustainable co-production of plant lipids and cellulosic sugars from transgenic energycane at an industrially relevant scale: A proof of concept for alternative feedstocks
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- Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL (United States); Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI), Urbana, IL (United States)
- Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), Upton, NY (United States); Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI), Urbana, IL (United States)
- Univ. of Florida, Gainesville, FL (United States); Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI), Urbana, IL (United States)
- Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL (United States). Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology; Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI), Urbana, IL (United States)
Development of sustainable and scalable technologies to convert lignocellulosic biomass to biofuels is critical to achieving carbon neutrality. The potential of transgenic bioenergy crops as a renewable source of sugars and lipids has been demonstrated at bench-scale. However, scaling up these processes is important for holistic analysis. Here proof-of-concept for chemical-free hydrothermal pretreatment of transgenic energycane-oilcane line L13 at an industrially relevant scale to recover vegetative lipids along with cellulosic sugars is presented. Here, pilot-scale processing of 97 kg of transgenic energycane-oilcane L13 stems and high solids pretreatment of bagasse enhanced the recovery of cellulosic glucose and xylose by 5-fold as compared to untreated bagasse and helped in the enrichment of vegetative lipids in the biomass residues which allowed its recovery at the end of the bioprocess. Palmitic and oleic acids were the predominant fatty acids (FAs) extracted from stems and leaves. The processing did not affect lipid composition. The efficiency of lipid recovery from untreated biomass was 75.9% which improved to 88.7% upon pretreatment. The vegetative tissues of transgenic energycane-oilcane L13 contained 0.42 metric tons/hectare of lipids. Processing vegetative tissues yielded 0.38 metric tons/hectare of lipids. This approaches an oil yield similar to soybean (global average 0.44 metric tons/hectare) and is almost twice as high as the oil yield from sugarcane engineered to hyperaccumulate lipids (0.20 metric tons/hectare). The study suggests that further optimization by state-of-the-art metabolic engineering and biomass processing can establish transgenic bioenergy crops for commercial drop-in fuel production.
- Research Organization:
- Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), Upton, NY (United States); Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI), Urbana, IL (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC), Biological and Environmental Research (BER)
- Grant/Contract Number:
- SC0012704; SC0018254; SC0018420
- OSTI ID:
- 2326923
- Alternate ID(s):
- OSTI ID: 2327065; OSTI ID: 2377410
- Report Number(s):
- BNL-225405-2024-JAAM
- Journal Information:
- Chemical Engineering Journal, Vol. 487; ISSN 1385-8947
- Publisher:
- ElsevierCopyright Statement
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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