DEVELOPMENT OF AN EFFECTIVE HARDWOOD PRETREATMENT FOR THE PRODUCTION OF ETHANOL IN A REPURPOSED KRAFT MILL, 2010 TAPPI PEERS Conference

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The North American pulp and paper industry is in decline due to falling demand for paper and board products and in some cases, loss of market pulp share to lower cost countries. As a result, it would be very attractive to repurpose a kraft  pulp mills to the production of ethanol. The development of a pretreatment process that can be easily implemented in a repurposed kraft mill with minimum capital is described in this paper. Various pretreatments method was studied for hardwoods that would be compatible in a repurposed mill. These pretreatments method included: water prehydrolysis, sodium carbonate, green liquor (sodium carbonate and sodium sulfide) and prehydrolysis‐green liquor. These results show that a pretreatment based on green liquor is the most effective pretreatment for a repurposed mill.  The pulps produced by this process can be enzymatically hydrolyzed to monomeric sugars with a high overall sugar recovery.  The use of green liquor for pretreatment ensures that the chemicals used during pretreatment can be recovered efficiently using proven technology and can be easily implemented in a repurposed Kraft pulp mill. A patent for the green liquor pretreatment process has been applied for by N. C. State University.