Life cycle assessment of lignocellulosic biomass pretreatment methods in biofuel production

In converting lignocellulosic biomass into biofuel, a pretreatment stage is required in order to make the biomass more readily available for the transformation. There are numerous pretreatment techniques that can be chosen, which are broken down into four categories: chemical, physical, physicochemical, and biological. The aim of this work is to provide a new assessment for some of the emerging technologies using life cycle assessment (LCA) combined with an analysis of the overall product yield. Using literature data, an LCA of four different pretreatment methods was carried out. Liquid hot water (LHW), steam explosion (SE), dilute acid (DA), and organosolv (OS) were chosen as the most common techniques with high scalability potential. Models were constructed using GaBi software. A cradle-to-gate analysis was selected with a common model of the corn stover growth and harvesting cycle being combined with the individual models for each pretreatment. Four impact categories were analyzed, and a selection has been discussed based on relevance to the biofuel production process. In nearly all of the impact categories, DA performs the worst due to the length of the process (12 h) and the amount of electricity required to elevate the temperature to 60 °C for that time period. In many of the other categories, the remaining three pretreatments perform comparably to each other with the exception of LHW which has significantly reduced CO2 emissions. LHW has slightly higher water depletion rates than both SE and OS, which is to be expected given the nature of the process. In terms of product yield, LHW produced twice as much total sugar than any of the other processes. The project concluded that while LHW and SE are viable options for the pretreatment of biomass, LHW is the most suitable technique for the pretreatment of corn stover. This pretreatment was environmentally friendly as it produced the lowest CO2 emissions, aligning with the main objective behind developing biofuels from agricultural residues. The process was also technically the most effective as it resulted in the highest sugar yields.