by Bernard Cooker (Chemical Processing Solutions/Biofuels Digest) This is a review of the biomass-fed chemical process projects to renewable chemicals which were published in Chemical Engineering Progress (CEP) and Chemical and Engineering News (C&EN) from 1/1/16 to 10/31/16, including activity in bioplastics, biopolymers and biochemicals.
It is based on a spreadsheet database of published information from CEP and C&EN, which has been maintained since 2013. All projects using biomass to manufacture a product and all process projects fed an intermediate produced from biomass are included in the database. It includes all projects regardless of scale, from laboratory (< 1 liter), through pilot (1 liter to <500 gallons), to commercial scale (>500 gallons). The database has the following data for each project: a unique reference number, the published data source, the raw material(s), the product(s), the estimated scale, its production capacity, the entities undertaking the project, its location by country, any financial investment or sales revenue and brief notes on the process technology. Unknown attributes are denoted NA.
The database contains 440 projects, from 9/1/13 to 10/31/16. For this article, all the projects from 1/1/16 to 10/31/16 were reviewed. Within this subset, 94 projects convert biomass to named products and 40 projects convert a biomass-derived intermediate to a named product. This article surveys the distributions of projects in the first group only, relative to: raw material, product, scale of project and location by country. This survey is limited by the restrictions on the information in the articles on which it is based: some source articles, perhaps through confidentiality, refer to “biomass” as the raw material and other articles refer to “chemicals” or “biochemicals” as the products. READ MORE