Waste biomass abundance

Waste Biomass Resource Abundance, Energy Potential, and Availability... 

Presuming the market for furfural and its derivatives ultimately grows to the point where commodity uses require the availability of large amounts of furfural, woody and waste biomass feedstocks can serve as a much more abundant and distributed source of supply than com cobs, oat hulls, and rice... 

Solid fuels refer to any fuels, such as coals, wastes, biomass, etc., that are in a solid state when they are burned in a high-temperature furnace. Coals are the most abundant fossil fuel on Earth, and are the most commonly used solid fuels for power generation, in the metallurgical industry, for gasification, and for heat supply. The wastes sometimes are burned in incinerators, as discussed in Chapter 8, and the generated heat is recovered to produce steam and electricity. Biomass mainly refers to plant materials, which are rarely used as fuels in industry. In this section, we will... 

It is important to recall that the research into bio-based surfactants extracted by chemical methods from waste biomass is still in its early days. As such, the production technology that will be described in the next section is still quite close to laboratory protocols and not industrial processes. As will be described in more detail, the quality of these surfactants is inferior to the quality of the biosurfactants produced (higher CMC, higher surface tension after CMC). However, the potential for high throughput, abundance of the biomass and the current economics of wastewater biosolid handling make this an interesting alternative for some applications that will be described later in this chapter. 

While this reaction is substantially exothermic (6), it provides an intriguing approach to the production of fuels from renewable resources, as the required acids (including acetic acid, butyric acid, and a variety of other simple aliphatic carboxylic acids) can be produced in abundant yields by the enzymatic fermentation of simple sugars which are, in turn, available from the microbiological hydrolysis of cellulosic biomass materials ( ] ) These considerations have led us to suggest the concept of a "tandem" photoelectrolysis system, in which a solar photoelectrolysis device for the production of fuels via the photo-Kolbe reaction might derive its acid-rich aqueous feedstock from a biomass conversion plant for the hydrolysis and fermentation of crop wastes or other cellulosic materials (4). 

Biosorption uses biomass raw materials that are either abundant (e.g., seaweeds) or wastes from other industrial operations (e.g., fermentation wastes). The metal-sorbing performance of certain types of biomass can be more or less selective for... 

Biomass resources will become more important in the future as alternatives to fossil resources, which will be exhausted sooner or later. The features of biomass arc renewable, carbon-neutral, and abundant. However, these resources have not been utilized efficiently and their unused portions are wasted in the world, Human beings are, thus, urged to develop efficient utilization technology of biomass, especially cellulosic biomass resources. 

More than twenty years ago, it was recognized that cellulosic biomass, including agricultural residues (such as corn stover, rice and wheat straws, and sugarcane bagasse), municipal wastes (such as yard and paper wastes), and industrial wastes (such as wastes from paper mills), is an attractive feedstock for ethanol-fuel production by fermentation because cellulosic biomass is not only renewable and available domestically in most countries but also available at very low cost and in great abundance. 

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