Page 166 - Refining Biomass Residues for Sustainable Energy and Bioproducts

138 Refining Biomass Residues for Sustainable Energy and Bioproducts

Primary source
Biomass(lignocellulosic) Fossil fuels
Biocatalytic process
Chemo-catalytic process
Biorefining process
(separation and hydrolysis) Oil extraction

Fermentation
Refinery

Crude and intermediates
Crude chemicals

Downstream processing
Gasoline Ethylene

Filtration/distillation/dehydration

Fine chemicals (C 5 ,C 3 ,C 2 )

Figure 6.1 Production of chemicals both by biological and fossil route with system
boundaries.

process also effectively helps in the production of functional chemicals at low capi-
tal cost (Sanders et al., 2007; Marquardt et al., 2010). The production of chemicals
both by biological and fossil routes represented with system boundaries is shown in
Fig. 6.1.

6.3.2 Bio-based chemicals
Collection and processing of biomass are the main criteria for bio-based chemicals.
Biomass is obtained from food factories, waste stream, and also from residues of
agricultural area. The most challenging part lies in conversion of complex mole-
cules to small and single molecules. The obtained single molecules are further pro-
cessed to value-added products at low cost and minimal energy inputs. The biomass
components are either converted into homogeneous or heterogeneous components,
depending upon the products of interest. In order to reduce the capital cost during
transportation of biomass and processing, BioLiq method was used, in which pri-
mary pretreatments were carried close to the field. The purity of the feedstock
raises a serious attention as these types of biomass consist of complicated and vari-
able networks. The introduction of chemical networks has gained lot of importance
as they mainly work based on the organizational principles to yield high-quality