Most of the biorefinery concepts be it wealth from waste or developing new strains with modifications, require atleast two combinations of solvents derived from fossil fuels or petrochemicals. So, is this biorefinery concept really an alternative to fossil fuels and way to sustainable development?
In an ideal case, the solvent can be first derived from fossil fuel. The spent solvent can be captured and purified using the solar energy. Since the fossil fuel is very similar to fat, any residual fats can be converted to oils or solvents.
Developing a strain to have high quantum yield that produces e a high yield of the target products is a long way forward. For a sustainable development in the developing country, adopting best (or affordable) technology available to convert biomass residuals to a higher quality of fuels would be the first step. During this process, the intention of using a technology to convert residuals to useful products is potential stained with using food source rather the residual biomass. Using corn to produce ethanol in the US during the food spike in 2011-2012 is one example. That competing interest is another problem to developing sustainable practice. After all, those efforts are trying to produce alternative goods is judged by the market unless with a strong support from the government such as R&D, taxes, incentives.
Thank you Binh for your views on sustainability in developing countries.
Looking for the alternatives of food crop, waste residues as you suggested is a greater option. But one bottleneck with technology transfer utilizing waste is the process optimization with highly variable parameters. instead of giving a monotonous substrates, residues are highly variable. so, how are we going to address the issues with product formation? because its not a highly stable operation with variable parameters.
Yes, processing residuals has to include the variety of the feedstock, and trading off between an optimized process (high efficiency, stability) to a sustainable practice for the environment. One way to to reduce such certainty is to have multiple processes to screen the feedstocks, in this case residual biomass, and incorporate multi-stage converting so that the parameters of each stage is small enough for the control and for an acceptable optimization. That is how I conceptualize such problem.
In most cases, making pellet biomass from the timber industry or processing diesel from residual fats from fishery or husbandry are two good examples to start with.
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