Technical and economical evaluation of bioethanol production from lignocellulosic residues in Mexico: Case of sugarcane and blue agave bagasses

Bioethanol is the main biofuel used in Brazil and USA, produced from sugarcane and corn. Nevertheless, the use of food to produce ethanol has to be replaced by agroindustrial waste or energy crops. The alternative raw material for bioethanol production in Mexico could be sugarcane and blue agave bagasses. In this work, we built a complete simulation process using Superpro Designer® software considering only the upstream units of fermentation for the technical and economical evaluation of lignocellulosic ethanol. Such consideration is based on a state-of-the-art analysis of the technology, indicating that technical and economical bottlenecks include pretreatment, saccharification and hexoses and pentoses fermentation. The simulation was carried out at different efficiency levels through a statistical analysis of surface responses and, three different saccharification processes to analyze ethanol production in terms of complete substitution of oxygenates in gasoline distributed in Mexico. The results indicate that ethanol production cost is 1.34 and 1.46 USD/gallon and potential production is 40.13 and 1380 MM gallon/year using blue agave bagasse and sugar cane bagasse, respectively.