Chemicals from Renewable Raw Materials: Opportunities and Challenges

The use of biomass for the production of fuels and chemicals can mitigate several of the problems involving the depletion of the world’s non-renewable resources. High value, lower volume biobased chemicals may also increase the return on investments in biofuels-only operations thus contributing to overcome a significant barrier to realizing a biorefinery’s economic goals. Recent evaluations of structures most easily obtained from a given conversion process have the advantage of tailoring broad-based processes to the building blocks available from certain biorefinery operations. The opportunities and challenges of producing chemicals from renewable raw materials can be exemplified by our analysis of structures available from chemical and biological transformations of orange, cashew and sugar cane residues and their integration into biorefinery operations. The processes involved that appear to be the most promising for the chemical industry, currently under investigation by Brazilian groups, are discussed.