Background: Empty fruit bunch (EFB) has many advantages, including its abundance, the fact that it does not require collection, and its year-round availability as a feedstock for bioethanol production. But before the significant costs incurred in ethanol production from lignocellulosic biomass can be reduced, an efficient sugar fractionation technology has to be developed. To that end, in the present study, an NaOH-catalyzed steam pretreatment process was applied in order to produce ethanol from EFB more efficiently.Results: The EFB pretreatment conditions were optimized by application of certain pretreatment variables such as, the NaOH concentrations in the soaking step and, in the steam step, the temperature and time. The optimal conditions were determined by response surface methodology (RSM) to be 3% NaOH for soaking and 160°C, 11 min 20 sec for steam pretreatment. Under these conditions, the overall glucan recovery and enzymatic digestibility were both high: the glucan and xylan yields were 93% and 78%, respectively, and the enzymatic digestibility was 88.8% for 72 h using 40 FPU/g glucan. After simultaneous saccharification and fermentation (SSF), the maximum ethanol yield and concentration were 0.88 and 29.4 g/l respectively.Conclusions: Delignification (>85%) of EFB was an important factor in enzymatic hydrolysis using CTec2. NaOH-catalyzed steam pretreatment, which can remove lignin efficiently and requires only a short reaction time, was proven to be an effective pretreatment technology for EFB. The ethanol yield obtained by SSF, the key parameter determining the economics of ethanol, was 18% (w/w), equivalent to 88% of the theoretical maximum yield, which is a better result than have been reported in the relevant previous studies.

In this study, the optimum conditions for pretreatment of corn stover using organosolv were determined. The predicted optimum conditions, determined using the response surface methodology, were ethanol concentration of 56.6 wt %, reaction temperature of 187.5 °C, and 320 mL of liquid throughput. Moreover, the pretreatment using recycled organosolv was carried out under the predicted optimum conditions. The pretreatment effect of the organosolv decreased as the organosolv was reused in the pretreatment process. When performing pretreatment with the initial organosolv, enzymatic digestibility for glucan was 71.0%. The digestibility was reduced as low as less than 66% in the first reuse process. Nevertheless, when repeatedly reusing the organosolv, the glucan digestibility remained mostly stable. It was confirmed that organosolv can be reused in the flow-through pretreatment of corn stover.

In this study, the chemical pretreatment method using ethanol organosolv with hydrogen peroxide was investigated to improve enzymatic saccharification of corn stover. The pretreatment method using ethanol with hydrogen peroxide in a flow-through reaction was proposed to lower the reaction severity such as the pretreatment temperature. With the same reaction time, the pretreatment process using organosolv (30 wt.% ethanol) containing 1 wt.% hydrogen peroxide at 150 °C resulted in a similar conversion yield as the result of the alkali pretreatment method using 15 wt.% aqueous ammonia at 170 °C. When corn stover was pretreated with 30 wt.% ethanol solution containing 5 wt.% hydrogen peroxide, a glucose conversion yield of 69.7 wt.% and glucose production of 23.8 g were achieved.