Biomass Deconstruction, Fractionation and Selective Catalytic Routes to Valuable Building Blocks

The quest for sustainable resources to meet the demands of a rapidly rising global population, while mitigating risks of increasing CO₂ emissions and associated climate change, represents a grand challenge for humanity. Biomass offers the most readily implementable solution to non-petroleum organic molecules for the manufacture of bulk, fine and specialty chemicals, polymers and transportation fuels. Biomass feedstocks vary widely and include lignocellulosics, other carbohydrates, proteins, other plant-derived molecules, aquatic sources and more. Biorefineries are an integral component to the transformation of the chemical industry from petroleum refineries to biobased chemical manufacturing. This GRC will look at overcoming fundamental challenges towards the development of individual biomass process streams that contain primary biomass components and the effective integration of these streams.

This GRC is organized to integrate the following science and engineering activities that will enable a transformation to the manufacturing of chemicals and materials from biomass: i) “front end” strategies to deconstruct or fractionate lignocellulose into individual biomass components, ii) increasing the selectivity and efficiency of chemical and biological catalysts for biomass conversion technologies, iii) selective lignin conversions that provide narrow compositional ranges of aromatic building blocks; iv) genetic engineer of plants to increase their susceptibility to deconstruction methods and as factories to produce natural and non-natural chemicals; v) programing increasingly effective microbes (synthetic biology) that convert complex feedstocks to nearly homogenous products.