Biochemical and thermochemical conversion of switchgrass to biofuels

With dwindling oil reserves and growing environmental concerns, researchers are looking at producing sustainable biofuels and chemicals from renewable resources like switchgrass. Biofuels and biochemicals will be produced in the near future from switchgrass in biorefineries using both biochemical and thermochemical platforms. We have summarized recent literature pertaining to different processing steps within the biochemical platform (pretreatment, enzyme hydrolysis, microbial fermentation, protein extraction) and thermochemical platform (pyrolysis, bio-oil, gasification, combustion, hydrothermal process) in this chapter. Though we have improved our fundamental understanding on the different processing steps to produce biofuels, several challenges still have to be overcome to create a bioeconomy and produce fuels and chemicals from biomass in an economic and sustainable manner.

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