Biomass annual production

Also, a Spanish company (Abengoa Bioenergy) has developed a process for the conversion of ligno-cellulosic biomass to ethanol based on SSF. A demonstration plant on the basis of wheat and barley straw has been operating in Salamanca since 2006, with an annual production capacity of five million litres of ethanol (Abengoa, 2006). 

Lignocellulosics are the most abundant renewable organic materials in the biosphere. They account for approx 50% of the total biomass in the world, with an estimated annual production of 1-50 x 1091 (4). Lignocellu-losic materials, particularly the residues obtained from wood processing, are usually much cheaper than sugar- and/or starch-derived feedstock, such as sugarcane and corn. They also have no competitive use as human or animal foodstuffs. 

Table 17.2. Annual production, production to biomass (PjB) ratios and turnover times offungi with annual leaf litter inputs and the percentage of the leaf input that was assimilated by fungi in different streams... 

The complex structure and seasonal dynamics of herbaceous macrophyte communities make it difficult to estimate their total annual contribution to floodplain lake production. Annual production estimates must incorporate the cumulative, sequential production of terrestrial, semiaquatic and aquatic plant communities and the spatial and temporal variation in their distributions. To date all measurements of macrophyte production have been made in a limited area on the central Amazon floodplain near Manaus. Only a few of these estimates have included contributions of more than one species. Junk and Piedade (1993) estimated the cumulative biomass increase of three successive macrophyte communities (terrestrial, semiaquatic, and aquatic) growing under... 

The average net annual productivities of dry organic matter on good growth sites for terrestrial and aquatic biomass are shown in Table 4.12. With the exception of phytoplankton, which generally has lower net productivities. 

The overall biomass accumulated in Forest ecosystems per unit area is 20 to 50 times higher than the annual productivity. This means that various chemical species... 

As furan derivatives, both furfural and 5-hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF) are readily prepared from renewable biomass. Furfural can be easily obtained from a variety of biomass containing pentoses, mainly including com cobs, oats and rice hulls, sugar cane bagasses, cotton seeds, ohve husks and stones, and wood chips. Furfuryl was first produced in the early nineteenth century and right now the annual production is 300,000 tons [101]. On the other hand, HMF is another major promising furan derivative due to its rich chemistry and potential availability from hexose carbohydrates or from their precursors such as fructose, glucose, sucrose, cellulose, and inulin [14]. 

Lignin is present in all vascular plants making it second to cellulose in abundance among polymers in nature. Since lignin, like many other biomass components, is formed via the photosynthesis reaction (Fig. 9.6), it is renewable and it has been estimated that the annual production of lignin on earth is in the range of 5-36 X 10 tons. 

Chitin was first isolated from mushroom tissue and named fungine in 1811 by Braconnot, a French botanist. A similar material was isolated by Odier from insect exoskeleton, which he termed chitine (1). Chitin is considered the second most plentiful biomaterial, following cellulose. The annual production of chitin biomass has been estimated at 1 x 10 kg worldwide (2). This has led to considerable scientific and technological interest in chitin and chitosan. Chitosan has become the preferred commercial form of this material as it is more tractable than chitin. Chitin is insoluble in most common solvents, whereas chitosan dissolves in many common aqueous acidic solutions. Chitosan has foimd applications in many primary industries such as agriculture, paper, textiles, and wastewater... 

By setting an annual production level of 100 tons of biomass and assuming the same CO2 consumption, as shown in Table 3, Chisti [2] compared the raceway and... 

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