The Size of Future Biorefineries

There has been significant debate on the scale of biorefineries and because the biorefinery concept can be appUed to hundreds of processes, the size is dependent on various factors including biomass avadabUity, economies of scale, and product demand. 

The transport of biomass is regarded as a key limiting factor for the size of the biorefinery as moving biomass long distances is not efficient due to the presence of futile oxygen and water. However, practically we see that biomass power stations in countries such as the UK will be using biomass imported from thousands of miles away to generate electricity. 

It seems likely that we will see the development of both small, localized biorefineries that utUize local biomass to satisfy local needs (but may also produce specialty products for export) and larger scale units that are either based on existing infrastructure (typically petrochemical plants, e.g., Rotterdam) or new large-scale biorefinery plants (e.g., cofiring power station, bioethanol production, etc.). 

Chemicals and materials can only be sourced from earth resources such as crude oil or biomass, unlike energy. Therefore biomass-derived chemicals and materials are the only alternatives to crude oil derived chemical products, which means the future is promising for such applications of biomass. 

As the price of crude oil increases, traditional petro-platform chemicals such as ethylene and benzene will become more expensive and less widely available. Therefore we have to rethink both our feedstocks for future chemical manufacturing and the platform molecules from which aU downstream products will be generated. 

---