Rapeseed straws are recoverable lignocellulosic biomass for second generation bioethanol production. Therefore, a pretreatment step is recommended in order to increase accessibility of enzymes to sugars. As a pretreatment step in this study, several innovative technologies have been performed in order to investigate their efficiency for delignification and enzymatic hydrolysis purposes: microwaves (MW), high voltage electrical discharges (HVED) and ultrasounds (US). As a key processing parameter, different levels of energy input were studied MW (1832-7328 kJ/kg), US (916-3664 kJ/kg) and HVED (204 -814 kJ/kg) corresponding to a treatment duration range of 10-40 min. Treatment temperature (60-90 degrees C) and medium alkalinity (0.125-0.5 M) impact was also investigated and optimized based on sugar and soluble lignin contents in black liquor, and lignin removal yields. Delignification yields increased from 28.3%, 28.6% and 31.2% for 10 min of treatment to 38.4%, 41.5% and 42.3% for 40 min of treatment, respectively for MW, US and HVED. However, in order to achieve the same efficiency the energy required by HVED is 9 times and 4.5 times less than that required by MW and US respectively. Treatment temperature also revealed to be important as sugars yields increased by 41.6% when temperature increased from 60 degrees C to 90 degrees C for HVED and the optimal medium alkalinity was found to be 0.3 M. Finally, better enzymatic hydrolysis yields were obtained and correlated to better delignification performances improving material accessibility. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.