LAUSR

Olive table industry, olive mills and olive pomace oil extraction industries annually generate huge amounts of olive stones. One of their potential applications is the production of bioethanol by fractionation of their lignocellulose constituents and subsequent fermentation of the released sugars using yeasts. In this work, we studied the influence of temperature (175–225 °C) and residence time (0–5 min) in the liquid hot-water pre-treatment of olive stones as well as the initial enzyme loading (different mixtures of cellulases, hemicellulases and β–glucosidases) in the later enzymatic hydrolysis on the release of fermentable sugars. The Chrastil’s model was applied to the d-glucose data to relate the severity of pre-treatment to enzyme diffusion through the pre-treated cellulose. Finally, the hydrolysate obtained under the most suitable conditions (225 °C and 0 min for pre-treatment; 24 CE initial enzyme concentration) was fermented into ethanol using the yeast Pachysolen tannophilus ATCC 32691. Considering the overall process, 6.4 dm3 ethanol per 100 kg olive stones were produced.