Organosolv pretreated birch sawdust for the production of green hydrogen and renewable chemicals in an integrated biorefinery approach
Omprakash Sarkar, Ulrika Rova, Paul Christakopoulos, Λεωνίδας Μάτσακας
Abstract
Sustainable production of fuels and chemicals is the most important way to reduce the carbon footprint in the environment. Forest based abundant lignocellulosic biomass as a renewable feedstock can be an attractive source of biofuels and biochemicals. This study evaluated the production of hydrogen (H2) along with platform chemicals from an organosol pretreated birch sawdust (SD). Acidogenic fermentation (AF) of pretreated SD resulted in production of green H2 (121.4 mL/gVS) along with short (17.8 g/L) and medium (2.64 g/L) chain carboxylic acids. Further integration of AF with anaerobic digestion (AD) in a biorefinery framework offered production of biomethane (bioCH4: 246 mL/gVS) from the leftover SD from AF. Integration of bioH2 with bioCH4 at different time interval of digestion showed 8–14 L biohythane formation ran with a H2 fraction of 1.6–0.3 H2/(H2 + CH4) documenting energy content of 8–9.08 kJ/gVS.