ABSTRACT
The two major producers of bioethanol fuels are the USA from corn and Brazil from sugarcane. The USA has used the dry grind (DG) and, to a lesser extent, the wet milling (WM) processes, while Brazil has used the Melle-Boinot (MB) and the modified Melle-Boinot (MMB) processes to convert sugarcane into bioethanol. The key steps used in these processes are the physical, chemical, and enzymatic pretreatments of the biomass, fermentation of the hydrolysates by yeasts, and distillation of bioethanol fuels from the fermentation broth. This book chapter reviews the research on these production methods in terms of productivity and production costs for these three production processes to produce bioethanol fuels from corn and sugarcane in the USA and Brazil, respectively.
