Feedstocks future exploitation

The above is followed by an overview of the assessment of the potential for future exploitation of plants for chemical feedstocks through developments in biotechnology and biorefining. 

The petrochemical industry typically works on a build-up approach where the base oil feedstock is fractionated, and complex materials are built up from simpler ones, producing a wide array of materials in the process, for a range of market outlets. The future exploitation of plant materials is seen in a somewhat similar fashion, although in contrast to the petrochemical industry, there will typically be an initial breaking up of more complex materials into simpler building blocks that can then be utilised and built on with the support of chemical, biochemical and catalytic processes, to produce more complex products synonymous with those produced by today s petrochemical industry. This whole crop approach to industrial use of plant-derived material is typically termed biorefining (see Chapter 1). 

Biofuels rely on organic feedstocks such as plant oil, food wastes and trees but their larger scale and rapid exploitation to meet government targets is stressing large areas of land and associated systems such as water, food production and recreation. A truly sustainable future for biofuels and other eco-system exploitation for industrial value requires a better understanding and more quantitative assessment of a number of critical issues ... 

In the following sections, current and potential future means by which plants can be exploited to produce feedstocks for the chemical industry are reviewed by key plant metabolite sectors ... 

Electrochemistry is clearly an important component of the technology of many quite diverse industries. Moreover, the future for electrochemical technology is bright and there is a general expectation that new applications of electrochemistry will become economic as the world responds to the challenge of more expensive energy, of the need to develop new materials and to exploit different chemical feedstocks and of the necessity to protect the environment. 

Using renewable feedstock to make plastics is a key dictum in environmental sustainability. An abundance of biomass that can be used as raw material is available. Of the 170 billion tons of biomass produced annually by nature, less than 4% is used by humans (mostly for food and wood-based industries (Thoen and Busch, 2006)). The first bio-derived plastic, celluloid, was invented back in 1860 followed by a few others in the 1940s. But with the discovery of oil, these inventions were never developed into commercial scale. With future shortage of fossil fuels, the time is ripe to exploit bio-based and bio-derived technologies (Momani, 2009). 

The amino acid production industry will remain as a fast growing business enterprise until a cheaper and energy efficient process is commercialized. Microbial amino acid production will be exploited to the most possible extend of maximal production capacity and process economics by new innovations in strain improvement, metabolic engineering, and systems biology. Microbial amino acid production holds a promising position in the future of white biotechnology and studies on utilization of feedstock for... 

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