Environmental analysis of bioethanol production strategies from corn stover via enzymatic and nonenzymatic sugar production

2021 
Abstract Two different technological process configurations for producing bioethanol from corn stover, namely, enzymatic hydrolysis for sugar production followed by fermentation (P1) and nonenzymatic chemical hydrolysis and subsequent fermentation (P2), were analyzed by a rigorous life cycle assessment. Three environmental impact categories (climate change (CC), fossil depletion (FD), and air pollutant (AP)) were estimated for the both process configurations on a system level. The “best-practice” case with a real scenario of the United States of America indicates that P2 is the most promising strategy from the perspectives of CC, FD, and AP. Considerable savings were achieved by P2: 1.34 kg CO2-eq/gallon of gasoline equivalent (GGE) for CC, 0.12 MJ/GGE for FD, and 0.24–0.94 g particle matters/GGE for AP. The robustness of the environmental impact results was validated by a scenario uncertainty analysis, and its results indicated that the corn stover composition is crucial.
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