Seemingly useless straw is a treasure according to Rongjie Li, the chairman of China BBCA Group. He says, “After treatment, straws can be converted into fuel ethanol as a substitute for petrol to prolong fossil resources’ usage time and mitigate greenhouse gas emission.”
Li says, “according to the current consumption rate of fossil resources, global oil exploitable year is about 40 years, natural gas is about 70 years, and coal is about 160 years. Moreover, fossil resources’ consumption unceasingly increases greenhouse gas emissions, resulting in global warming and other environmental problems.”
Li adds, “Via biotech, food and non-grain feedstock such as straw cellulose and lignocellulose can be processed and converted to produce liquid fuels, materials and other chemicals, such as food additives, medical chemical materials, polymer plastics, coatings, cotton materials and solvents. It’s a true carbon balance cycle mode, which can radically solve the problem of fossil resources shortage and greenhouse gas emissions, and realize friendly environment and sustainable development.”
In order to protect food safety, the development trend of this kind of biomass industry is to use non grain feedstock. Li says, China has rich cellulose biomass with the total amount 1.2 billion tons. If we use biotech to process those cellulose biomass, they may substitute 400 million tons of oils. Though China’s research and development on cellulose technology starts late, there are five to six Chinese enterprises which have made technological breakthroughs in cellulose with the support from National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Science and Technology and the Ministry of Finance. At present, these enterprises have made great progress and now are in pilot scale or industrialization experiment phase.
However, the product cost based on cellulose technology is 20% to 30% higher than that of petrol chemical technology, so now the cellulose technology hasn’t meet market competition’s requirements. Rongjie Li suggests that, when China is working out biomass industry development plan, China should strongly support the research on straw cellulose’s conversion and industrialization demonstration, and advocate enterprises to improve technology and techniques for industrialization promotion. At the same time, Li suggests that China can grant policy and fund support for cellulose-based bioenergy enterprises and bio material industry to promote non-grain biomass industry’s improvement and realize environment friendly sustainable development.
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