February 18th, 2011
FACT Foundation is currently working on a project to develop bioethanol from agricultural waste products like rice straw and wheat straw. Implementation of the project will be Indonesia.  The lignocellulosic feedstock has to be pre-treated in order to make the material more accessible to enzymatic conversion. This conversion yields sugars that are subsequently converted into ethanol by yeasts. After distillation ethanol is obtained that can be used as a transportation fuel, for cooking or to generate electricity. A general study on second generation biofuels was done by the students Schurer and Pedonomou from the University of Groningen and Mr. Frederiks from FACT. The result was a report.  A follow up of this study was done by Datema, also from the University of Groningen, which elaborated more on the financial aspects as well as setup of a pilot for Indonesia.  As pretreatment is one of the more energy consuming steps in conversion of lignocellulosic biomass more research is done to optimize this step. Mr. Fagoaga from FACT is working on the setup and pretreatments like steam explosion, liquid hot water, lime, silage and biological pretreatment are assessed. Experts from different fields are involved, for example from the Wageningen University, Dyadic, and the University of Groningen. From these mentioned pretreatments silage and biological conversion are investigated by Biesbroek from the department Chemical Engineering of the University of Groningen, as he is doing an internship at FACT. Mainly the silage option looks very promising as the energy demand is very low and the amount of chemicals (for which waste-management is necessary) that is used is almost zero. Adding bacteria that can partly originate from cow rumen to the silage as a pretreatment is promising as recognized by a recent science article and by contact with a source in Indonesia.  Lime pretreatment and silage will probably be field and or lab tested for their application in the process. Furthermore, FACT is looking for partners who want to share information or experiences in this field. FACT also invites partners from Indonesia to gauge their intent in such cellulosic ethanol production from rice straw.