Corn is the second most abundant crop produced worldwide annually. Its residue, corn stover, is among the three most agricultural residues globally and the first one in the United States. The available corn stover in the world could be used to produce more than 45 million cubic meters of bioethanol (60% of the world production) instead of being mainly burnt on the fields. This practice could potentially reduce Green House Gases (GHGs) emissions by more than 150 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent per year. A comprehensive review on pretreatment, saccharification and fermentation was performed in this study with investigating the effect of each of these steps on the whole process. The results showed that pretreatment is the most crucial step that hinders bioethanol production from corn stover, whereas newly developed methods like ionic liquids show promising results of 90% lignin degradation. A review on the techno-economic analysis performed in the literature indicated that the integrated biorefinery approach can be employed as an efficient strategy to cut the ethanol minimum selling price to half (0.27 $/L) with an average capital cost of 475 million dollars.

玉米是全球每年产量第二大的作物。它的残留物玉米秸秆是全球三大农业残留物之一，也是美国第一。世界上可用的玉米秸秆可用于生产超过 4500 万立方米的生物乙醇（占世界产量的 60%），而不是主要在田间燃烧。_{这种做法可能会减少超过 1.5 亿吨 CO 2}的温室气体 (GHG) 排放相当于每年。本研究对预处理、糖化和发酵进行了全面回顾，并调查了这些步骤中的每一个对整个过程的影响。结果表明，预处理是阻碍玉米秸秆生产生物乙醇的最关键步骤，而新开发的方法（如离子液体）显示出可降解 90% 木质素的可喜结果。对文献中进行的技术经济分析的回顾表明，综合生物炼制方法可以作为一种有效的策略，将乙醇最低售价降低一半（0.27 美元/升），平均资本成本为 4.75 亿美元。