Policy •• Because of this situation, some experts propose to go to a really high scale: Utilization of one or even two million tonnes of biomass per year are necessary to overcome the cost issue through the economy of scale. •• This means that high investments are needed and no local feedstock supply is possible. Locations for such a high-scale biorefinery would be mainly limited to big harbours such as Rotterdam, Antwerp or Hamburg. And it still means high risks for selling the products at competitive prices, especially the lignin. •• Most concepts for these biorefineries focus on drop-in commodity chemicals such as bioethanol, mainly because of the production volume, existing infrastructure and incentives. For this, the structurally very complex cellulose polymer needs to be broken down to be processed into low-value commodities. Pros and cons of drop-ins were discussed in the last chapter. •• To implement those biorefineries, long-term incentives from the public sector are required. One of the main reasons for supporting lignocellulosic biorefineries was to achieve a high biomass utilization efficiency and to avoid unused bio-waste streams. Is this still a real argument? If the lignocellulosic biorefinery mainly produces drop-in commodity chemicals, the biomass utilization efficiency can be low. We should not forget the highly efficient biomass utilization in the sugar and starch as well as in the pulp and paper industries. These existing plants also count as biorefineries optimised for high efficiency and they are running without any incentives. All parts of the biomass are utilized and no bio-waste is left over. Smart, Small and Clever: New Bio-Based Building-Blocks and Innovative Pathways can Utilize the Full Potential of Functionalized Platform Molecules Already today, the production of bio-based chemicals accounts for about €48 billion of turnover in the European Union (2013), as figure 1 (right) clearly demonstrates. And almost all of these chemicals are not drop-in chemicals, but bio-based dedicated speciality chemicals. With new and also known technologies such as biotechnology, chemical modification and extraction, and with new bio-based building-blocks with new functionalities, this amount can be considerably expanded. Emerging strategies imply new building blocks and chemicals, new value chains, new investment in plants and infrastructure. These new building blocks are often produced by new processes, especially by industrial biotechnology using yeast/fungi, bacteria
and enzymes to produce chemicals such as succinic or lactic acid in an efficient way. New emerging strategies based on biomass can take advantage of utilizing higher levels of structure already provided by nature. Industrial biotechnology is becoming an important biomass transformation technology: highly specific transformations can be accomplished under mild reaction conditions with often very high yields. Currently only 5-10% of all processes for biomass transformation in the chemical and material sectors are conducted according to biotechnological approaches, but the tendency is strongly increasing. (Mathijs et al. 2015) Next to industrial biotechnology also the extraction of high value complex biomolecules is an important utilisation pathway, which can often be processed before or parallel to other pathways of utilisation. From several biomass sources, waste streams and residues extractable compounds are available and partly already in use. This is especially true for pine chemicals from wood residues and waste streams from the pulp and paper industry, mainly tall oil derived chemicals used for cleaning agents, solvents, lubricants, paints, adhesives and more. Another example are grape residues (pomace) containing Resveratrol, Polyphenols and Tannins, used in paints, tanning agents and nutraceuticals. There are many more examples and the extractable compounds are always of high value and can be used in several utilisation areas. (Mathijs et al. 2015).
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