Fundamental Investigations on System-Level Cost Evaluation for Economic Viability of Cellulosic Biofuel Manufacturing

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This research can enable expanded production of ethanol from wood and other cellulose-based feedstocks by lowering the cost of production. This will contribute to resolving two major issues: energy shortage and global warming. Consequently, the success of this research will help improve the economic viability of the U.S. ethanol manufacturing industry, reduce oil dependence, and benefit the environment and society in terms of greenhouse gas emissions reduction. In a carbon-constrained world, this research will serve to green the U.S. transportation sector, and provide a competitive advantage to the U.S. renewable energy industry. This project will closely integrate with the training of graduate as well as undergraduate students, especially female and underrepresented minority students. The ideas and results will be broadly disseminated through classroom teachings, conference presentations, and journal publications. The research objective of this grant is to generate new knowledge to build a system-level cost model for cellulosic biofuel manufacturing utilizing the interrelations among major individual manufacturing processes and to establish the methodology for system-level cost-effective decision making to improve the economic viability of cellulosic biofuel manufacturing under the constraint of ethanol yield. First, existing experimental results will be analyzed to obtain the interrelations among individual cellulosic biofuel manufacturing processes. Then these obtained interrelations will be used to construct a system-level cost model for cellulosic biofuel manufacturing. Based on this model, a cost-effective decision making tool will be established to reduce the overall cost while maintaining the ethanol yield target of cellulosic biofuel manufacturing. Finally, experimental validations and scalability investigations of research results will be performed.