Hemp has recently been rediscovered as a novel resource crop in various regions of Japan. The purpose of this research is to evaluate the production characteristic of hemp, and to analyze its energy balance. Evaluation was made by using the data of the hemp farming and the primary processing. The input energy of farming and the primary processing resulted in 11,442MJ/ha and 25,271MJ/ha with the energy profit ratio of 11.7 and 4.8 respectively. The amount of the energy consumption in the primary processing was the largest in all the operation processes. The energy profit ratio of the hemp pellet fuel was 4.2 almost in equilibrium with that of the wood pellet, and showed the possibility of its effective use.

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Four dilute-acid pretreated and hydrolysed lignocellulosic raw materials were evaluated as substrates for fermentative hydrogen production by Caldicellulosiruptor saccharolyticus. Their fermentability was ranked in the order: barley straw › wheat straw › corn stalk › corn cob. The content of 5-hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF) in medium with hydrolysates prepared from corn cob (1.0 g/L) and corn stalk (0.8 g/L), respectively, reached levels likely to be toxic for growth of C. saccharolyticus. HMF was absent in wheat and barley straw hydrolysates. Furfural concentrations in media with wheat straw, barley straw and corn stalk hydrolysates were low (0.2-0.3 g/L), while it was higher in corn cob hydrolysates (0.6 g/L).

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The microalgae has been demonstrated to be the potential source of renewable biodiesel that is capable of meeting the global demand for transport fuels. The Chlorella sp. T-89 which is separated from domestic algae with easy-culturing and the high lipid content was used to be an investigated material for biodiesel production. Supercritical carbon dioxide fluid was applied to extract the microalgae lipid through the equipment with automatically controlling of temperature and pressure. Also the technique of synchronized fractional extraction with the different chemical compounds to extract the lipid ingredients from the microalgae was employed to examine the influences of the lipid extraction quantity under various operation conditions. Box-Behnken design and response surface methodology (RSM) were applied to find the optimal extraction/purification suitability of the microalgae. An empirically correlated formulation is obtained in mass production condition by using the experimentally statistical models. Hence, this study can establish the most suitable technique for the extraction and purification of biodiesel from microalgae for mass production condition, since it can raise the unit production of the microalgae lipids, to shorten the time of product development, to lower the production costs and to improve the industry competition ability.

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