- The Inventors: Mr. Tran Dinh Toai

- Address: Institute of Chemistry - Institute of Science and Technology of Vietnam

- Description of technology and equipment:

 Based on the actual situation, our country is having more than 5 million hectares of rice land. Beside the obtained rice grains, agricultural waste is approximately 80 million tons annually. The amount of this waste is not handled effectively and caused ecological environment pollution while few people know that agricultural waste is actually a valuable resources because it is a form of lignocellulosic biomass. If we are able to produce ethanol from straw, it not only solves the energy problem but also overcome the above consequences.

 Biotechnological processes to produce ethanol from lignocellulosic biomass - agricultural waste, beside the material pretreatment, separated cellulose from the straw, removed hemicellulose, lignin, it consists of two main stages: hydrolysis and fermentation.

1 "hydrolysis" is the cellulose transformation to glucose metabolism.

2 "Fermentation" is the glucose transformation into ethanol.

The advantage of this method is non-toxic, environmentally friendly due to high temperature and pressure.

 According to the experimental study, each 1 kg of straw will gain about 0.4 kg of cellulose, if we can select the microorganisms having enzymes with high activity, the efficiency of hydrolysis stage can achieve 80-90% , which means that 0.4 kg of cellulose will gain average of 0.34 kg glucose. By the above method, with large amounts of agricultural waste (straw) in our country today, if we used 30%  for ethanol production by to 15% efficiency, we would be able to obtain from 3.6 to 4.5 million tons of ethanol, which exceeded the target set by the government by 2015.