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Sugarcane as a Bioenergy Source: History, Performance, and Perspectives for Second-Generation Bioethanol

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Abstract

For hundreds of years, sugarcane has been a main source of sugar, used as a sweetener, and alcohol, fermented from the plant juice. The high cost of petroleum towards the end of the twentieth century stimulated the development of new fermentation technologies for producing economically viable bioethanol from sugarcane as an alternative to importing petroleum. More recently, awareness of the effects of greenhouse gas emissions due to the global climate changes propelled bioethanol as a viable renewable fuel. Consequently, sugarcane gained importance as a bioenergy feedstock. However, the lack of knowledge about sugarcane physiology, notably on aspects of photosynthesis and source–sink relationship, has slowed the advance of this expanding bioenergy-producing system. Besides the changes in source–sink relationship, another option to increase bioethanol production even more would be to use a greater fraction of the total biomass of plants, i.e., not only the soluble sugars but also the sugars present in the cell wall fractions. Here, we review the history of sugarcane as a bioenergy crop and discuss some of the relevant routes that could be adopted in the near future to make sugarcane an even better feedstock for producing biofuels.

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank Paul H. Moore and Melinda Moore for reading and improving drafts of this manuscript. This work is part of the production of the Instituto Nacional de Ciência e Tecnologia do Bioetanol (FAPESP 2008/57908-6 and CNPq 574002/2008-1) and of the Centro de Processos Biológicos e Industriais para Biocombustíveis (FAPESP 2009/52840-7 and CNPq 490022/2009-0).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratório de Fisiologia Ecológica de Plantas (LAFIECO), Department of Botany, Institute of Bioscience, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil

    Amanda P. de Souza, Adriana Grandis, Débora C. C. Leite & Marcos S. Buckeridge

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  1. Amanda P. de Souza
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  2. Adriana Grandis
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  3. Débora C. C. Leite
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  4. Marcos S. Buckeridge
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Correspondence to Marcos S. Buckeridge.

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de Souza, A.P., Grandis, A., Leite, D.C.C. et al. Sugarcane as a Bioenergy Source: History, Performance, and Perspectives for Second-Generation Bioethanol. Bioenerg. Res. 7, 24–35 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12155-013-9366-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12155-013-9366-8

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