Forget Cellulose, It's All About Lignin!

By Derek Foshee
          We like wood a lot. We build houses out of it, use it in paper, and even burn it away. Cellulose is the primary material found in wood, and is used in many of the applications above, however there is another more sustainable material found in wood that could be very promising in the future of chemical and fuel production and we have been wasting it the whole time. This is lignin, which is a polymer that has been used in aromatic compounds and carbon fiber for a while now (Hiltunen et al., 2016). So far it has not been too successful due to the refining process not being industrially friendly (Hiltunen et al., 2016). This article talks about a fairly new process involving DTC's or deep eutetic solvents that have low melting mixtures using different molarities to extract desired plant components and chemicals ( Hiltunen et al., 2016). In this case they used varying molarities of boric acid and sawdust and were able to extract 27.4% of ligin (Hiltunen et al., 2016). This may not seem like a lot but previous attempts have achieved far lower results due to lignin being broken down through other methods (Hiltunen et al., 2016). This method of extracting lignin is very promising for future fuel and chemical production. It is far less expensive and has a far better yield then any other technique and when scaled industrially, lignin production could have a far better economic value.

Figure 1: lignin fragment

References

Hiltunen, J., Kuuti L., Rovio S., Puhakka E., Virtanen T., Ohra-Aho T. Vuoti S. 2016. Using a low melting solvent mixture to extract value from wood biomass. Sci. Rep. doi: 10.1038/srep32420 

Lignoworks. lignin fragment. image, http://www.icfar.ca/lignoworks/content/what-lignin.html

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