The BIOVINESHOOT project: progress towards a technological solution for underused agricultural residues

• This is Dr Manzanares Paloma , Dr Aleta Duque and Dr-Ing. Raquel Iglesias Esteban, PhD. , all from CIEMAT , contribution to 21o EEBIONews.

In the current scenario of increasing consumption of fossil fuels worldwide and severe consequences occurring in the climate, the production of biofuels and bioproducts from biomass resources appears as a key pillar in the transition from a fossil-based economy towards a bio-based economy. Among the different types of biomasses, lignocellulosic biomass has great potential.

Lignocellulosic biomass comprises a wide range of materials from different sources (e.g. agricultural waste and forestry, energy crops, agro-industrial waste and the fraction organic waste from urban solid waste), which constitute a wide source of renewable raw materials susceptible to revaluation through appropriate transformation processes. An example is the vine shoot (VS) biomass, the waste originating from the operations of vine pruning, which represents an abundant and cheap source of residual lignocellulosic biomass that currently has limited use as fuel in power generation industries and, mainly, in-home applications.

The project Biovineshoot is a coordinated project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities that has as a general objective the achievement of a comprehensive fractionation of VS into their main components, and their subsequent valorisation into bioenergy and bioproducts through chemical and biochemical conversion processes integrated into a biorefinery strategy. The Energy, Environmental and Technology Research Centre (Madrid, Spain), ( CIEMAT , of its acronym in Spanish), the Spanish National Research Council ( CSIC ; Madrid, Spain), and the Universidad de Jaén , (Jaen, Spain), constitute the project consortium.

The main activity of CIEMAT in BIOVINESHOOT is “Biochemical conversion of the cellulosic fraction of vine shoot biomass into ethanol and bioproducts” (BIOBISEV subproject). It focuses on the study of an integral fractionation technology of VS biomass through extrusion technology, in combination with ionic liquids, aimed at generating different streams containing main biomass components, i.e., cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin. In the cellulose-enriched pretreated materials by twin-screw extrusion, it considers the optimization of the enzymatic hydrolysis?step to achieve the maximum sugar production yield and concentration from pretreated VS biomass. An important goal is the optimization of the enzymatic dosage by studying process strategies to increase the effectiveness of the hydrolysis under moderate or even low enzyme dosages. Finally, sugar-containing hydrolysates as fermentation media to obtain targeted high-added value bioproducts, i.e., ethanol, lactic acid and caproic acid?are used. Different fermentation strategies are carried out for each compound employing selected microorganisms (yeast and bacteria) along the different project stages.

The BIOVISEB contributes to bioeconomy deployment through an improvement of the current chemicals production systems and the enlargement of the scientific, technical and economic development around the wine sector. The results obtained provide valuable information to design valorisation plants in other geographical areas with great concentrations of biomass residues from agroindustry, so contributing to enlarging the bioeconomy growth in those zones. Moreover, this novel approach may also have an important social impact linked to the possibility of boosting employment creation in rural areas with a high density of residual biomass, as is the case of wine crop regions.

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