Comparison and Evaluation of Two Pretreatment Processes for Enhancing Enzymatic Saccharification of Sweet Sorghum Bagasse

With world reserves of petroleum fast depleting and growing environmental degradation concerns, ethanol has emerged as an important alternative transportation fuel. Lignocellulosic biomass is a readily available resource that can be used for ethanol production after breaking the cellulose and hemicellulose fractions into their component monosaccharides. In this study, we investigated the release of reducing sugars from sweet sorghum bagasse using a two – stage chemical pretreatment (dilute acid hydrolysis followed by alkaline-peroxide delignification) and steam pretreatment; the solid residue obtained in both cases were further subjected to enzymatic saccharification. The results show that steam pretreatment followed by enzymatic saccharification is more promising. It released 75.7% of the total sugars originally present in the bagasse, compared to 66.1% obtained with twostage chemical pretreatment-enzymatic saccharification.