Date palm empty fruit bunch (EFB) is a reliable and underutilized agriculture residue generated by the date industry. EFB contains polymeric sugars that can be converted to biofuel when subjected to pretreatment, enzymatic hydrolysis, and microbial fermentation.<\/p>\n
Optimized biofuel processing conditions produced 119\u2009kg ethanol per dry metric ton EFB. The highest sugar conversions from enzymatic hydrolysis were found with Ammonia Fiber Expansion (AFEX\u2122, MBI International, Lansing, MI) pretreatment conditions of 2:1 ammonia-to-biomass ratio, 80% moisture content, and a temperature of 120\u00b0C, for 30\u2009min residence time. These conditions produced 52.5\u2009g\/L and 34.8\u2009g\/L of fermentable glucose and xylose, respectively. This hydrolysate was inoculated with a glucose- and xylose-consuming recombinant yeast strain producing 35.8\u2009g\/L and 31.8\u2009g\/L ethanol with and without nutrient supplementation, respectively. A complete mass balance for EFB pretreatment, enzymatic hydrolysis, and microbial fermentation is presented in this manuscript.<\/p>\n
The world’s population is increasing at a steady pace and elevating the demand on consumable products like fuels and industrial solvents. Sustainably producing these products is possible using renewable resources such as agricultural residues (e.g., corn stover, switchgrass, date palm tree byproducts) that will reduce dependency on fossil fuels like crude oil. Currently, these agricultural residues are either burned, plowed back into the field, or disposed in landfills.1,2 When harvesting dates, the date palm industry produces large amounts of underutilized seasonal agricultural residues that can be fermented into ethanol and other valuable products.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Date palm empty fruit bunch (EFB) is a reliable and underutilized agriculture residue generated by the date industry. EFB contains polymeric sugars that can be converted to biofuel when subjected to pretreatment, enzymatic hydrolysis, and microbial fermentation. Optimized biofuel processing conditions produced 119\u2009kg ethanol per dry metric ton EFB. The highest sugar conversions from enzymatic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":59,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","nova_meta_subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5572],"tags":[12366,10408,12390],"supplier":[753],"class_list":["post-37111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bio-based","tag-fuels","tag-greenchemistry","tag-solvents","supplier-michigan-state-university"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/59"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37111"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37111\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37111"},{"taxonomy":"supplier","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/supplier?post=37111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}