WSU researchers find new method to extract lignin

Washington State University researcher’s new and novel method to extract lignin could help spin wheat straw into cash. Lignin, a super tough biomaterial has been a problem in biofuel production.

Lignin produced using the new method was color-neutral, odorless and homogenous, an advance that could make this carbon-neutral material a more viable candidate for development of high-value products. The researchers reporting in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences they extracted up to 93% lignin with up to 98% purity from wheat straw, producing a significant amount of material in a uniform way that could make it more attractive for industry use.

Lignin is the second most abundant renewable carbon source, making up about 30% of the non-fossil fuel-based carbon on Earth. It is in all vascular plants, where it forms cell walls and provides plants with rigidity. Lignin allows trees to stand, gives vegetables their firmness and makes up about 20%-35% of the weight of wood. The material holds great promise as a precursor for biobased materials and fuels, but it is also notoriously difficult to extract from plants.

The material is usually separated during papermaking and biorefining, but these processes often contaminate and significantly alter lignin’s chemical and physical properties, decreasing its value. So most lignin is either burned to produce fuel and electricity or used in low-value products, such as for cement additives or as a binder in animal feed. Producing a more homogenous lignin provides the opportunity to pursue high-value material development to replace petroleum-derived plastics and polymers.

In their work, the researchers used a solvent to separate the lignin from wheat straw and were able to preserve and control its key properties, producing a more uniform molecule with a consistent molecular weight that makes it more useful for industry. The lignin extracted was light-colored, which is more like the lignin that exists in nature.

Because it is an electron-rich compound, the lignin had a strong affinity for the solvent, and the electron interactions allowed the researchers to extract it with minimal chemical reactions, which protected its natural molecular structure that is so often easily damaged in chemical separations.

WSU’s Office of Commercialization has filed a provisional patent and will assist the researchers for the scale-up and eventual commercialization of this technology. To make it more viable for industry applications, the research team is working to decrease the lengthy processing time and the amount of purification chemicals needed.

The work was done in collaboration with Edoardo Apra, a computational scientist from PNNL, and Professor Art Ragauskas from University of Tennessee, Knoxville. It was supported by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture as well as WSU’s Commercialization Gap fund.

The news is sure to excite some folks as lignin has been a barrier to some ideas for biofuels and other energy related efforts. The problem is often that lignin is built with molecules that are useful yet so bound us as to be useless or worse. That bound up matter tends to lock up the sugars and starches most useful and desired.

Ultimately the market will look at the end lignin product and what opportunities it may present. Will there be more than one form such as a fine dust or a matt? Time will tell. But lignin is very tough stuff and getting it into the materials market instead of trying to extract the components for biofuels sound like a very good idea indeed.