Diversity of Biorefineries and doubly green chemistry: an economic approach

Résumé En

For the European Commission, the development of biomass use is based on the emergence of a Knowledge BioBased Economy. The transition towards this KBBE involves two separate strategies of scientific thinking. On one hand, a part of the bodies of knowledge is dedicated to progresses in biomass manufacture, involving research on pre-treatment technologies, plant fractionation, and programs dealing with the “biomass recalcitrance”, to microbial and physico-chemical treatments or production and functionalisation of polymers. Another aspect consists in integrating the progress in the implementation of the twelve principles of green chemistry, for example focusing on energy savings, using the principle of atom economy or substitution of solvents. Scientists consider that the implementation of these principles involves systematic analysis allowing the most relevant compromises for a given situation. Therefore, the concept of doubly green chemistry is born. In this concept the goal is to report use of raw vegetable material as renewable resource and processing this resource in an environmentally friendly way, from the Anastas and Warner 12 principles of green chemistry point of view. The communication use a mapping of publications claiming the implementation of the 12 principles of green chemistry in programs connected to biomass, based on a corpus of databases, completed by the perusal of laboratories programs, and interviews.II. Principal results (1)The technological variety will last. We consider two distinct biomass treatment logics: the 1st one, regroups the main routes, and deconstructs biomass into simpler degraded molecules (thermochemical route) or via platform molecules (biochemical route) which can be used as intermediates and building block for conventional use in the chemical industry ; the 2nd logic searches more direct routes (when possible, without recovery of intermediate products) in order to decrease the biomass conversion cost, by using one pot processes or processes containing mostly multi-step reactions and continuous processes, or limited transformations such as reactive extrusion. (2) If we observe the use of the principles of green chemistry as environmental innovation, we observed that, in the case of biorefinery processes using intermediate molecules, the principles of green chemistry are being applied in the form of incremental innovation, while more radical innovations are being investigated in the case of one pot processes.