Multi-Year Analysis Plan Page 38

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Pretreatment: Decrease pretreatment systems capital cost by 24% by increasing solids

concentration in the reactor from 19% to 30%. This lowers capital cost for pretreatment

equipment from $35.8 million (in the “FY 03 Cost”) to $27.4 million.

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Enzymatic Hydrolysis: Reduce the cost of enzyme from $0.64 to $0.10 per gallon of ethanol

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Strains: Achieve high yields of ethanol from glucose (>95%) and xylose (>85%).

As indicated in Figure 17, the cumulative effect of achieving these targets in all of the barriers provides

approximately 50% savings in the cost of ethanol relative to the experimentally verified performance of

the technology in FY 2003.

Figure 17: Translating Sugar Platform Barrier Reductions to Cost Impacts for Ethanol

Analysis Plan

The Sugar Platform Analysis project captures the process engineering and life cycle analysis needed to

direct research by translating all of the proposed and actual outputs from research into quantifiable costs

and benefits for the technology. Analysis is performed under this task to support the on-going research in

the sugar platform. Analysis helps to provide direction and focus to the research by evaluating the

technical, economic, and environmental aspects of biomass sugar production and conversion. Much of the

analysis work is a continuation and elaboration of past efforts to model and understand the economic

factors and key uncertainties related to the sugars route to ethanol from lignocellulosic biomass. The

process to produce ethanol will still be used as a base case process to evaluate the economic impacts of

technology developments. However, increasingly greater emphasis will be given to producing additional

products from the sugar streams in addition to ethanol.

Specific planned activities include:

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Continue to support the Novozymes and Genencor subcontracts to determine impacts of the

developments

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