Many studies have explored the pretreatment of lignocellulosic biomass based on oil palm empty fruit bunch (OPEFB) which is categorized as potential biomass waste for bioethanol production. Before proceeding further to obtain bioethanol, several steps such as pretreatment to increase organic constituents are needed. The ionic liquids (ILs) were commonly investigated by many researchers for lignocellulosic pretreatment because it is easy solubilization property, non-toxic, and not harmful impacts on the environment. Therefore in this study, the hypothesis and main objective were to observe the effectiveness of triethylammonium methanesulfonate ion liquid (TMS IL) in the OPEFB lignocellulose pretreatment process. Three variations were studied to obtain optimization of the pretreatment process, such as times duration, IL composition, and temperature. Based on these results, we observed the effectiveness of the time duration for OPEFB pretreatment of 20 hours. Furthermore, it was applied to determine the optimization of IL composition and temperature showing that using 91% (1:1:10) at 120°C for 20 hours has provided good performance for the OPEFB lignocellulose pretreatment process. TMS IL has exhibited the ability to reduce hemicellulose and lignin contents to 7.35% and 17.80%, whereas cellulose was increased by 54.24%. This has the opportunity to be projected to a larger scale for bioethanol production based on OPEFB lignocellulose.
Keywords: OPEFB; TMS; bioethanol; lignocellulose; pretreatment.