Enhancing methane production from lignocellulosic biomass by combined steam-explosion pretreatment and bioaugmentation with cellulolytic bacterium .

Background: Biogas production from lignocellulosic biomass is generally considered to be challenging due to the recalcitrant nature of this biomass. In this study, the recalcitrance of birch was reduced by applying steam-explosion (SE) pretreatment (210 °C and 10 min). Moreover, bioaugmentation with the cellulolytic bacterium was applied to possibly enhance the methane production from steam-exploded birch in an anaerobic digestion (AD) process under thermophilic conditions (62 °C).