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Green Biorefinery: a Sustainable Way to a Sustainable Future
Over the last few decades, the achievement of modern petroleum-based chemical industry has enriched extensively our life, meanwhile, the over activities of humankind have placed our environment under immense stress. One of those most noticeable problems is the global warming climate caused by over dependence on and consumption of non-renewable fossil-based resources. From a sustainable point of view, the renewable carbon inherent in biomass is vast, making biomass an attractive candidate among alternative carbon sources. Shifting society’s dependence away from fossil-based energy resources to renewable alternatives, such as biomass resources, can be regarded as an important contribution towards the establishment of favorable conditions for the climate and a sustainable economy.
Although biomass is extensively available, the potential cost of renewable carbon sources and the relative lack of technology available for the conversion of renewable carbon sources into useful marketplace chemicals and materials are still primary barriers in this area. It is estimated that in 2025, up to 30% of raw materials for the chemical industry will be produced from renewable sources. To achieve this goal and partial or even complete re-adjustment of whole economics to renewable resources, it is necessary to develop innovative process technology, separation and depolymerization process catalytic systems. Meanwhile, it is vital to the future of sustainable chemical production with employment of low environmental impact chemistry to convert biorenewable resources into valuable chemicals and materials.
Desirable biorefinery operations will first extract high-value chemicals already present in the biomass, and then the biorefinery will focus on processing plant polysaccharides and lignin into feedstocks for bio-derived materials and value-added chemicals. This requires the development of innovative process technology, separation and depolymerization process catalytic systems. Supercritical CO2, near critical water, gas-expanded liquids, ionic liquids (ILs) and microwave processing, etc are well suited to these challenges. These tunable solvents and emerging technologies offer distinct green chemistry processing advantages that could be exploited in the processing of renewable bioresources.
This session will highlight the latest advances in applying green chemical technologies and novel high efficient catalytic technologies/systems to the transformation of typically low value and widely available biomass feedstocks into biomaterials and bioenergy as well as-biochemicals. An overview of the application of green chemical concepts in biorefienery by experts in their fields will illustrate how the chemists are taking endeavor to explore a sustainable way to a sustainable chemical industry in the 21st century.
