(363a) Sustainable Bioprocess Synthesis Routes for Tailor-Made Chemicals

The decrease in the world's crude oil reserve and environmental concerns have continuously driven the current chemical processes which are heavily reliant upon fossil fuel to the use of renewable resources for the production of energy (needed in the transport and industrial sectors), as well as the production of a host of chemicals (needed to sustain chemicals-based consumer products). Since the potential to convert the renewable resources to more valuable products has dramatically increased, it means that alternative strategies can start to compete while minimizing environmental impact and increasing sustainability. Based on the conversion of material, industry would preferentially use biomass, in particular lignocellulose biomass, because it is a non-food feedstock and has low purchase cost, as well as desirable environmental and price attributes. The process for separation of biomass constituents and converting them to high value products is known as biorefining. Two major pathways, hydrolytic and thermochemical, could be considered for biorefineries. Because there are numerous ways, there is a need for a systematic methodology capable of generating, analyzing, and selecting the sustainable processing routes for conversion of a set of raw materials into a set of desired tailor-made products. Tailor-made bio-petrochemicals are those chemicals that are made to meet given specifications, by reducing and/or replacing non-renewable resources (such as petroleum) with appropriate biomaterials or a combination of both. Economic and environment impacts will be minimized through the optimal use of renewable and non-renewable feedstocks.

As a proof of concept, the synthesis routes based on chemical, biocatalytic and fermentation have been generated for two raw material resources (crude oil and lignocellulosic biomass) and a set of products (gasoline, gasohol, ethanol with different water content, etc.). A superstructure-based methodology has been developed to enumerate all possible synthesis routes and their mathematical models to calculate the material, product and residual (waste) flows for each route. Each operation in the corresponding routes is also associated with a cost so that a quick techno-economic analysis of the feasible synthesis routes can be made. Based on these results, the optimal synthesis route is identified for further analysis. The implementation of this superstructure based methodology needs a knowledge based of data for various operating in the synthesis routes and a library of models for each type of operation. The presentation will highlight the application and implementation of the superstructure two-based systematic methodology for a ?model? biorefinery process. For this process, a knowledge base has been created with a large amount of collected data. Also, a library of simple mathematical models has been created. The results show the successful identification of a sustainable bio-process synthesis route for a small set of tailor-made chemicals. Future work will be to build on this (superstructure, knowledge base and model library) to develop bigger biorefinery systems.