Techno-economic and environmental assessment of biorefinery technologies

Abstract

Nowadays, advanced biofuels production and higher electricity generation from lignocellulosic materials bring technological alternatives in the sugar and ethanol industry. Nevertheless, the introduction of new production processes imposes a real challenge due to the complexity and diversity of the technological routes that can be evaluated. In addition, there are economic and environmental issues that must be considered during the development and consolidation of these new configurations. Accordingly, this research aims to develop a systematic methodology to perform the assessment of technical, economic and environmental aspects, by comparing them for the biochemical and thermochemical routes integrated in a Brazilian sugarcane biorefinery. Hence, operating technical data of each technological route will be adopted as well as the economic and environmental aspects of using these systems. The proposed models assess the conventional (route 1), biochemical (route 2) and thermochemical (route 3) biorefineries using simulation programs and mathematical tools to modeling the ethanol production and power generation operations. Furthermore, the process integration and different uses for the bagasse excess will be investigated with various pretreatment techniques (steam explosion, hydrothermal and AFEX) aiming the optimizing and ranking of the routes. The results will indicate sustainable settings of these production processes based on multi-criteria approach. In this respect, it must be underlined that the post-doctoral project are linking to the BIOEN/FAPESP thematic project "Biorefinery development integrated to a bioethanol sugar cane plant with zero CO2 emission: routes to convert renewable resources to bio-products and bio-electricity" regarding the maximization of bioethanol and electricity productivity, the waste heat recovery and the CO2-capture analysis of the systems. (AU)