Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

On an annual basis, the gasoline consumption in Canada averages 40BL and the country has, for now many years now, established a mandate requiring that ethanol be added to this volume at a minimal 5%(vol). On a countrywide basis, such volumes correspond to 2BL of ethanol per year from which 450ML should be used for consumption only in the Province of Québec. The partner of this project, the GreenField Global distillery located un Varennes (Qc), is the only large-scale producer of ethanol in the Province and produces close to 200ML fuel-grade ethanol yearly. Thus, the residual volume required to reach the federal mandate is still missing and has to be imported. In order to solve this problem, the Québec Government has recently implemented tax returns to promote the production of first (starch-based) and second (cellulose-based) generation fuels. In the latter case however, the technologies are not yet ready to operate at industrial scale and first-generation ethanol remains the only economical option to produce large volumes of ethanol. In order to reduce the important gap between existing and emerging technologies, the concept of Ethanol Gen 1.5 has been put forward: using crops that produce sugars and that are not generally used as a common human food supply, the objective is to use ""free"" sugars (easily extractible) combined with structural sugars such as the ones composing cellulose and hemicellulose. Such an approach would ease the transition between known and emerging technologies by diluting the cost of second generation sugars using first generation and more accessible sugars. In this project, the first objective will be dedicated to finding economical means of allowing the conservation of sorghum on longer periods, thus producing an increased feeding period to the distilleries. The second objective of this project will be targeting the impact of simple extraction technologies in order to verify if such techniques could be more cost-efficient than the steam treatment technique that was previously investigated by the Université de Sherbrooke team and its industrial collaborators.