Overview on Cellulosic BioEnergy Production

Biofuels provide an effective route to avoiding the global political instability and environmental issues that evolve from reliance on petroleum fuel. At present, most biofuel produced as ethanol are generated from corn starch or sugarcane sugar. But this can meet only a small fraction of global fuel requirements, and conversion of food into fuel might only add other dimensions to the global problems. Plant cell walls are an ideal source of bioenergy, and their conversion for cellulosic bioenergy crops, which are both abundant and renewable, are the most promising alternative approach. However with today's technology, conversion of lignocellulosic biomass of these crops into fermentable sugars for biofuels requires relatively costly production of microbial cellulases in bioreactors and expensive pretreatment processes. Promising paths to decrease these two costs are to modify the genomes of the cellulosic bioenergy crops so they can use the free energy of sun to self-produce heterologous cellulases and hemi-cellulases only in their leaves and stalks (not in seeds, roots or pollens), and genetically modify these crops for higher polysaccharides and for less needs for expensive pretreatment processes. The speaker will identify the most promising cellulosic bioenergy crops around the globe, and will discuss several approaches for production of affordable cellulosic biofuels. At the end, she will reason that butanol might be a better alcohol fuel produced from grains and/or from cellulosic bioenergy crops as liquid transportation fuel.