Try Vaughan, McDonald et al, "The biomass refinery as a route to
fuel alcohol from green crops" Proc 6th Int Symp on Alcohol fuels
technology v 3 p 3-46, 1984
We also did a large report to the New Zealand Liquid Fuels Trust
Board, which has not been published.
If you want to use a fermentation route then drying is not important,
except to reduce liquid wastes. Even then, the liquid can be
concentrated by multiple-effect evaporation with very high
efficiency, and converted to a molasses which would have some
stockfeed value.
Leaf proteins have high value, at least in limited quantities,
because of the amino acid profile (similar to fishmeal) and the
pigments (particularly xanthophyll for egg colour)
> >
> > A few years ago we did a lot of work on growing grasses for fuels.
> > The idea was to harvest them in a lush green state, extract the
> > protein (around 20% of dry-matter content), and sell this as a
> > by-product. The fibrous material remaining is finely divided and
> > readily dried, or alternatively hydrolysed to sugars, then fermented
> > to alcohols. The fibre is largely hemicellulose rather than
> > cellulose as found in mature grasses, and there is less lignin, so
> > hydrolysis is easier than for high-cellulose crops. As usual, it
> > was not economic given the ruling oil prices.
Greg's reply:
> ...The grasses would be harvested in a dry condition
> which would reduce the need of energy for drying the raw
> materials as compared to the scheme you described. The people at Oak Ridge
> and the National Renewable Energy Research Lab are working on
> conversion of celulose to ethanonl by fermentation. They wrote a paper
> that appeared in Science vol 251 (1991): 1318-1323 "Fuel Ethanol
> from Celulosic Biomass" They estimated that ethanol from biomass
> would be economically competitive with gasoline around the year 2000.
> I believe protien in the raw material would be recoverable after
> fermentation.
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mcdonaldr@hort.cri.nz <Rod McDonald>
Engineer/scientist
Horticulture and Food Research Institute
Private Bag 3123, Hamilton, New Zealand
Phone +64-7-8385675 work, +64-7-8552019 home, Fax +64-7-8385655
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