STTR Phase I: Development of Sugar Beet Pulp Enzymatic Pretreatment System

这个小企业技术转让（STTR）第一阶段项目开发了一种生物质的预处理工艺，该工艺将用作制造生物燃料的原料，从而解决了该工艺中的一个重要问题。 在植物和树木材料（生物质）可用于生产生物燃料或塑料的生化构件之前，必须对其进行预处理以释放目标成分。这一预处理步骤是开发具有成本效益的“生物精炼厂”的一个重大障碍，这种“生物精炼厂”将把生物质，包括目前未被利用的农业残余物，转化为生物燃料和增值的生物化学品。 传统的方法是将复杂的生物质分解成小的组分，然后加工成酒精或重新组装成复杂的化学品，而这种新方法直接将生物质的各种组分转化为生物燃料和生物化学品。这导致成本低得多的过程。 第一步是从生物质的“骨架”中去除成分，并将其加工成生物燃料和生物化学品，并专门开发酶来执行这些任务。这一步不仅生产产品，而且使另一组酶更容易提取生物质“骨架”的更大组分，用于加工成生物化学品。这个过程一直持续到主干完全分解，所有可用的组件都处理完毕。最后，剩余的糖被发酵成乙醇。该项目的更广泛影响是通过开发使农业生物精炼厂具有经济可持续性的技术，使美国能够在2025年之前实现减少60%石油进口的目标。

This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project develops a pretreatment process for biomass that will be used as feedstock for making biofuels, thereby solving a significant problem in this process. Before plant and tree material (biomass) can be used to produce biofuels, or biochemical building blocks for plastics, it must be pretreated to release the targeted components. This pretreatment step is a significant barrier to the development of cost-effective "biorefineries" that would convert biomass, including agricultural residues not currently being utilized, into biofuels and value-added biochemicals. Instead of the conventional approach, where complex biomass is broken down into small components for later processing into alcohol or reassembly into complex chemicals, this new approach directly converts the various components of the biomass into biofuels and biochemcials. This results in a much less costly process. The first step is to remove components from the "backbone" of the biomass and process them into biofuels and biochemicals with enzymes specifically developed to perform these tasks. This step not only produces products, but also makes it easier for another set of enzymes to extract larger components of the biomass "backbone" for processing into biochemicals. This process continues until the backbone is completely disassembled and all the available components were processed. At the end, the remaining sugars are fermented to ethanol.The broader impact of this project is to significantly enable the US to meet the goal of reducing petroleum imports by 60 percent before 2025 by developing technology that makes the agricultural biorefinery economically sustainable.