National Advanced Biofuels Consortium: How Biomass Fits into the Petroleum Infrastructure

May 19, 2011

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(National Advanced Biofuels Consortium) This 55-slide presentation from a National Advanced Biofuels Consortium Webinar describes the organization and work of the consortium using many valuable charts, graphs and illustrations, including those that depict existing infrastructure.
One of the most useful illustrations helps conceptualization of what a biomass-based transportation fuel/biochemical world will look like during and after the transition from a petroleum-based world, although it does not specifically include ethanol as either a fuel or fuel additive.
The scientific challenges to making this transition are listed:

Develop technology that can use complex sugars from lignocellulosics (woody biomass or corn stover)
Effective, low cost process to provide sugar stream from biomass—called hydrolysate
Robust organism that does not suffer from inhibitors present in biomass hydrolysate
Organism must be able to use both five carbon sugars and six carbon sugars found in hydrolysates
New integrated process must be cost competitive with current simple sugar-based process

Technologies being worked on by the consortium members in response to these challenges are described with graphics and illustrations. Download presentation