November 17, 2014
* Corresponding author: Rafal Bogel-Lukasik rafal.lukasik@lneg.pt
Laboratório Nacional de Energia e Geologia, Unidade de Bioenergia, 1649-038, Lisboa, Portugal
[more about author]
Sustainable Chemical Processes 2013, 1:18 doi:10.1186/2043-7129-1-18
Excerpt
"Among the several definitions of biorefinery, the most widely used and recently accomplished by International Energy Agency (IEA) Bioenergy Task 42 is “Biorefining is the sustainable processing of biomass into a spectrum of marketable products and energy”. The biorefinery is an industrial facility (or network of facilities) that cover an extensive range of combined technologies aiming to full sustainable transformation of biomass into their building blocks with the concomitant production of biofuels, energy, chemicals and materials, preferably of added-value [4]. The biorefinery concept embraces a whole crop approach of biomass conversion pathways leading to a whole portfolio of valuable products, drawing direct similarities to today’s fossil oil refineries, in which multiple fuels, basic chemicals, intermediate products and sophisticated products are produced from petroleum [5,6]. To accomplish these needs science developed many less energy-requiring and less waste-generation technologies. However, still need of a new investment requirements and a perceived high risk of adoption of new technologies are slowing down the implementation of new processes. The solution of this problem is the development of more sustainable technologies that significantly increase the resource efficiency of chemical processes and reduce the operation time of such technologies. In addition, these new technologies should be accomplished in chemical industries by the introduction of chemical processes that do not produce contaminants, but only non-toxic commodities and recyclable or easily degradable materials. Industries should be based on ideal processes that start from non-polluting starting materials, lead to no secondary or concomitant products and require no solvents in order to carry out any chemical conversion or to isolate and purify the product. Such intrinsically clean processes seem still hardly attainable at present. But it is expected from the ingenuity and resourcefulness of chemists that the chemical industry replaces many existing processes with new technologies aiming at a zero environmental footprint. This is important for fine and pharmaceutical industries which use energy [7] and generate a significant amount of chemical waste. However it is probably even more important for large chemical industries which a few minutes carbon footprint equals a yearly carbon footprint of pharma enterprise [8]. The waste and energy problems must be solved in the near future because the waste generation and energy consumption are increasing strongly due to growth of the world population and increasing standards of living in emerging economies [9]."
The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://www.sustainablechemicalprocesses.com/content/1/1/18
Image source: http://wastebiorefining.blogspot.hk/2011_10_01_archive.html
