These groups have made significant technological progress over the years in areas such as enzyme production and pentose sugar fermentation. These groups recognize that softwoods are a much more difficult substrate to work with. They require further evolutionary development, either scale up from the laboratory to a non-commercial demonstration unit or further process refinement to be able to process softwoods effectively and economically. The advantage of a low feedstock cost when wood is used is currently offset by lower co-products credits and higher capital costs. For softwood feedstock more effective pretreatment processes are required in order to lower capital costs.
All processes require work to be done on finding higher value markets for co-products.
The grain ethanol industry is pursuing a similar strategy. The thermochemical process reviewed is a parallel alternative process for the conversion of wood to ethanol. It would appear to offer a number of potential advantages over the wood to sugar to ethanol methods including its ability to utilize bark. However, the technology can not be considered commercial. In the past there have been several unsuccessful wood gasification demonstration projects.