A holistic overview on corn cob biochar: A mini-review

Abstract

Corn cob is one of the agricultural waste materials subjected to improper burning, which creates pollution. It can be used for the production of green technologies for further applications. Carbonisation or slow pyrolysis could be promising alternative to burning. It has many applications, such as soil ameliorant, waste water treatment, carbon sequestration, composting, supercapacitor, fuel cell and biocomposites material. It motivated to investigate the suitability of corn cob as a potential material for biochar production and its application. The advanced form of analysis, such as thermogravimetric, scanning electron microscopy, surface area, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and Raman spectroscopy, is elaborated for in-depth knowledge of characteristics. The hypothesis is that if the available corn cob is used for biochar production, it will reduce the carbon dioxide (CO2) emission. On a global level, conversion of available corn cob into biochar is expected to reduce CO2 emission by 0.13 Gt per year. The reduction in CO2 emission also favours economy. If 1 tonne of biomass per year is converted into biochar, 0.82 tonnes of CO2 can be reduced per year and by considering the emission cost of Rs 1800 per tonne, the cost saving would be Rs 1476 per year. The presented mini-review article provides an outline of the state-of-art information on corn cob biochar and its novel application. It will be helpful to scientific domain to find new opportunities in biochar research and also the humanity will be benefitted due to reduction in greenhouse gases.

Efficient production of 1,2,4-butanetriol from corn cob hydrolysate by metabolically engineered Escherichia coli

“…Corn cob is inevitably and massively generated as a by-product of the corn agriculture. Nowadays, corn cob is either burnt as fuel or treated as a waste causing environmental pollution [ 1 , 2 ]. Corn cob can be hydrolyzed into corn cob hydrolysate (CCH) with xylose, arabinose and glucose [ 1 , 2 ].…”

“…Nowadays, corn cob is either burnt as fuel or treated as a waste causing environmental pollution [ 1 , 2 ]. Corn cob can be hydrolyzed into corn cob hydrolysate (CCH) with xylose, arabinose and glucose [ 1 , 2 ]. Numerous efforts have been made to obtain efficient routes for resource utilization of CCH [ 3 – 5 ].…”

Compositional and Structural Analysis of Selected Crop Residues and Potential Applications

“…Crop residues are forms of waste generated during the post-harvesting or post-processing of crops. They are principally the leftovers from the harvesting, consumption, or [30][31][32], and CC [33][34][35] revealed the areas of possible applications.…”

Investigation of the Effects of Torrefaction Temperature and Residence Time on the Fuel Quality of Corncobs in a Fixed-Bed Reactor

“…Biomass conversion technologies have been classified into thermochemical processes, biochemical processes, and physical or mechanical processes. There have been studies seeking to improve the efficiency of corncob utilization for bioenergy through thermochemical processes such as combustion [11,12], gasification [13,14], and carbonization [15]. There has been some work to investigate biochemical processes such as anaerobic digestion [16] and ethanol fermentation [17].…”