With the U.S. importing over 55% of its petroleum, largely for transportation, the domestic ethanol industry has been growing to help eliminate this trade burden and long-term economic liability. But current capacity of nearly 2 billion gallons accounts for less than 2% of this country's needs and growth has been limited due to costs compared to gasoline. Fortunately an opportunity to expand the ethanol industry exists using the remainder of the corn plant, called corn stover, as a fermentation feedstock for ethanol. Since less than 10% of the corn crop goes into ethanol, there is an ample supply of corn stover. Technoeconomic estimates of producing ethanol form biomass like corn stover find it competitive with corn ethanol. Still efficient production of fermentation products from the multiple biomass sugars is a technical challenge. Fortunately, a microorganism has been found and developed that can produce value- added fine chemical coproducts on these biomass sugars. The Phase I effort will demonstrate fine chemical production on corn stover-like sugar mixtures, and on authentic corn stover feedstock. Additionally, using the same fermentation microorganism, initial steps will be taken to develop it to produce a different fine chemical product, which has a large market. ANTICIPATED RESULTS & POTENTIAL COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS OF RESEARCH This SBIR effort will address the problem improving ethanol economics by developing at least two value-added coproducts that can be made in an ethanol plant. These coproducts will provide a significant revenue stream while requiring minimal plant modification. These coproducts can be produced in either a new corn stover ethanol plant, or in numerous dry mill ethanol plants throughout the rural Midwest. Final commercial use will be a partially purified coproduct suitable for blending in feed thus adding value to existing feed coproducts. Also, this technology will demonstrate that many higher-value chemicals can be produced from biomass.
