Navigating the Opportunity Space of Oilcane Biorefineries through BioSTEAM, an Open-Source Platform for Streamlined Design and Process Simulation.
Advisor: Associate Professor Jeremy Guest
The wider production of vegetable oil from conventional oilseed crops is limited by low productivity of oil per hectare of land, limiting our ability to scale the production of renewable oleochemicals and oil-based biofuels. Microbial oil production and oil-accumulating feedstocks such as oilcane and oil-sorghum (engineered from sugarcane and sweet-sorghum, respectively) hold the potential to drastically improve oil production in agriculture and meet expected demands for biodiesel. Due to trade-offs oilcane biomass yields, low microbial oil yields, and challenges in oil recovery, it is difficult to determine how does the potential sustainability of vegetative cane oil compare with microbial oil, which fermentation product (oil or bioethanol) is more sustainable, and, critically, whether processing oilcane presents any advantages over processing other sugarcane lines. Large uncertainties in market pressures, feedstock characteristics, and the processing technology performance also lead to difficulties in navigating trade-offs and prioritizing research and development. With the development and deployment of a rapid and robust open-source platform that enables the evaluation of thousands of biorefinery designs under uncertainty, it may be possible to develop, evaluate, and compare biorefinery configurations to characterize the potential for new oil-accumulating feedstocks and processing technologies for sustainable biofuel production.
To this end, this work: (1) enabled the rapid evaluation of landscapes of designs through the development of BioSTEAM (2) developed detailed models for processing oil-accumulating feedstocks and assessed their potential sustainability via uncertainty and sensitivity analyses, and (3) compared design alternatives and charted development pathways towards sustainable oilcane and oil-sorghum processing in the United States. Altogether, this work demonstrates the potential for oilcane, oil-sorghum, and microbial oil production in the United States and exposes the biorefinery models developed here to the research community to further scrutinize, expand, and deploy.
