Use of cultivars of low cost, agroindustrial and urban waste in the production of cellulosic ethanol in Brazil: A proposal to utilization of microdistillery

Ethanol production from sucrose from sugarcane allowed Brazil to become a world reference in the production of biofuels. Presenting the 2013/2014 crop harvest of 653,519 thousand tons of sugarcane, thus producing 37,713 thousand tons of sugar and 27,543 thousand m³ of ethanol and generating 91,493 thousand tons of bagasse. However, as referenced since 1970, Brazil could exploit sugarcane waste surpluses in order to use bagasse and straw for ethanol production, but the data presented in the last decade emphasized in a significant direction and on increasing the use of these wastes in the generation of bioelectricity. Currently there are 486 sugar-energetic power plants with the productive capacity of 12.056 MW to the power network (autoconsumption of sugar-energetic power plants corresponds to 50% of the energy produced), representing 8.4% of the Brazilian energy matrix. Therefore, this review reports that the offer of bagasse and straw for ethanol production in industrial scale will be insufficient, thus, arising the need to find possible lignocellulosic materials with the potential to be used for ethanol production, thus allowing the supplemental absence of straw and bagasse sugarcane that could be available according to the locality, both in the rural area as well as in the urban area. Furthermore, the review reports the application of sugarcane wastes in the production of bioethanol, the difficulties encountered in the implementation of cellulosic ethanol power plants based only on the use of bagasse and straw of sugarcane, the possibility to use alternatives of lignocellulosic materials with potential to be applied in Brazil, besides the production of cellulosic ethanol, the production of co-products and by-products using microdistillery, based on the biorefinery context in an efficient manner.