Importance of policy support and feedstock prices on economic feasibility of bioethanol production from wheat straw in the UK》.pdf

Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 17 (2013) 291–300 Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews journal homepage: /locate/rser Importance of policy support and feedstock prices on economic feasibility of bioethanol production from wheat straw in the UK Jade Littlewood a, Richard J. Murphy a,c, Lei Wang b,c,n a Department of Life Sciences, Division of Biology, Imperial College London, London SW7 2AZ, UK b Centre for Environmental Policy, 14 Princes Gardens, Imperial College London, London SW7 1NA, UK c Porter Institute, Imperial College London, London SW7 2AZ, UK a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t Article history: The economic feasibility of producing bioethanol from wheat straw in the UK using various state-of- Received 19 July 2012 the-art pretreatment technologies (steam explosion with and without acid catalyst, liquid hot water, Received in revised form dilute acid and wet oxidation) is assessed in this study. Under the current-technology base-case 29 September 2012 modeled using high enzyme loadings demonstrated at the laboratory-scale, wet oxidation pretreatment Accepted 3 October 2012 Available online 27 October 2012 had the lowest minimum ethanol selling price (MESP) of £0.347/L ($2.032/gal). A contribution analysis showed feedstock price and enzyme cost were the two greatest contributors to the MESP, which led to a Keywords: prospecti