Really tough to stop drinking booze. I sit here on the park bench all day drinking and thinking about IFUS stock. Franchise/license the technology. Kind of like any franchise the secret sauce is needed at every location. Legally binding contracts prevent them from stealing the sauce. My contacts would not even be needed. Go straight to the companies that make fertilizer for plants/etc. Go straight to cattle feed suppliers in the closest areas with sugarcane.
Stop looking for customers and GO after putting it in the hands of people that have PLENTY of customers. Outline a process for the secret sauce to be added to their existing supply chain. Let them try it for free - no strings attached. If it benefits them then IFUS can rapidly scale the model and expand.
Answer this for me - Let's just take one ton of SGP+ cattle feed. Sugar Cane is free. So what percentage of the cost is the chemical additives?
You have the labor and overhead expenses. The shipping costs are probably a big part in the equation. Heck the entire cost of running ANY business is getting very expensive these days. But to license the right to use the secret sauce to other people making products does what? Those people are already marketing their end products to consumers. IFUS would have little cost in just supplying them with the sauce.
As I sit on my park bench and knock out another bottle of Vodka, I am thinking about the process. Pre-treating lignocellulosic biomass is a major technological challenge. Recycling the liquid fraction may reduce chemical inputs and water use but may have lower efficiency. Seven chemical pre-treatments of sugarcane bagasse were compared: four acids (sulfuric, citric, phosphoric, and oxalic), two alkaline (sodium and calcium hydroxides) and an oxidative (alkaline hydrogen peroxide). The liquid fractions resulting from these pre-treatments were reused up to five times. After each pre-treatment cycle, the solid fraction was hydrolyzed with Celluclast 1.5L enzyme in a 1:10 solid-liquid ratio. Sulfuric and oxalic acids solubilized 80% of the hemicellulose over the cycles. Sodium and calcium hydroxides and hydrogen peroxide removed lignin until the fourth cycle. About 70% of lignin were removed with alkaline hydrogen peroxide. This pre-treatment lead to the highest glucose release after the enzymatic hydrolysis, above 50% in the three cycles analyzed. The best efficiency in enzymatic hydrolysis followed the order H2O2-alkaline > NaOH > oxalic acid > phosphoric acid > H2SO4 > citric acid > Ca (OH)2. With the recycling, more than 62% in reagents used in the pre-treatment of sugarcane bagasse were saved, enabling an economy in the costs at this stage of the process.
Graphical abstract
The search for more sustainable technological solutions has driven an energy revolution to replace fossil fuels and their derivatives. This replacement is necessary in view of the environmental impacts on the hydrosphere, lithosphere, and atmosphere associated with the use of fossil fuels [1]. Biomass plays a fundamental role in this revolution. It is able to offer large quantities of liquid, gaseous, and solid biofuels, in addition to high value-added chemicals, and can supply up to 30% of the energy demand of the humanity by 2050 [2].
The worldwide lignocellulosic biomass production, excluding wood, is estimated to reach 2.8 billion tons [3], being 520 million tons in Brazil [4]. Sugarcane bagasse stands out for its expressive production associated with the cultivation of sugarcane to produce sugar and ethanol. The 2019/2020 Brazilian sugarcane harvest is estimated at 622 million tons, generating approximately 180 million tons of bagasse [5].
Currently, biomass is used mainly by direct burning to produce thermal and electric energy [6], with less production of consolidated biofuels, whether liquid or gaseous, such as ethanol, biodiesel, and biogas [2]. It is estimated that the annual production of these biofuels reaches 130 billion liters of ethanol and biodiesel [7] and 25 billion m3 of biogas [2]. In addition to thermal, electrical energy and consolidated biofuels, biomass has been used to produce advanced fuels and chemical compounds with high added value through the biochemical biomass processing pathway. Examples are the production of the ABE mixture (acetone, butanol, and ethanol) [8], sugarcane diesel, 1,3-propanediol, polyhydroalkonates, and aviation biofuel [9,10].
The use of this lignocellulosic biomass to produce second-generation biofuels by the biochemical pathway generally requires several process steps: (1) pre-treatment, (2) hydrolysis, (3) fermentation, and (4) product recovery. Each stage presents technical and economic challenges, the greatest of which is pre-treatment. Pre-treatment methods aim to solubilize and separate one or more components of the plant cell wall and release them for subsequent steps of enzymatic or acid hydrolysis and fermentation or biodigestion [11]. Pre-treatment is essential due to the crystalline nature of cellulose, the physical barrier formed by lignin and the presence of complex interactions between hemicellulose and cellulose. Pre-treatment must achieve four basic objectives: (1) separate the matrix from lignin; (2) reduce cellulose crystallinity; (3) increase the amorphous fraction of cellulose; and (4) solubilize hemicellulose. These objectives aim to make cellulose more accessible to chemical and biological hydrolysis [12].
Pre-treating can be physical, chemical, biological, or combined methods [13]. Each method has advantages and disadvantages, such as the high energy consumption of the physical methods [14], the high input consumption of the chemical methods [15], and the long time required by the biological methods [16].
Chemical pre-treatments have characteristics that allow their widespread use in the pre-treatment of different types of lignocellulosic biomass [17], such as solubilization of hemicellulose in acid pre-treatments, removal of lignin in alkaline/oxidative pre-treatments, and separation of polysaccharides by ionic liquid pre-treatments [18]. Examples are the use of diluted acid [19], sodium hydroxide [20], peroxide alkaline hydrogen [21], ozone [22], and ionic liquids [23], for the pre-treatment of sugarcane bagasse.
After pre-treatment, the liquid and the solid fractions are separated, the solid fraction being the pre-treated biomass which is used in the continuation of the process and the liquid fraction may be discarded or re-used Re-use of the liquid fraction can take advantage of the chemical reagents still available but their efficiency tend to decrease after each re-use cycle [24]. Several studies have already highlighted the importance of recycling the liquid fraction during the chemical pre-treatment of different types of lignocellulosic biomass, and have addressed how this technology can contribute to the reduction of inputs and energy in the processes [25].
Thus, the objective of this work is to compare seven types of sugarcane bagasse pre-treatments and to evaluate the use of successive recycles of the liquid fraction after each chemical pre-treatment cycle without adding or correcting the reagents, and to measure the efficiency of the enzymatic hydrolysis after each cycle.
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