Abstract
The twenty-first century is witnessing fossil fuel depletion, increase in the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases, industrialization, urbanization and global climate change. There is a growing need to switch over to renewable energy resources and move towards circular bioeconomy. Sustainable bioeconomy has been promoted to replace fossil fuels and to produce bioenergy, chemicals and high value-added products. Biorefineries play a pivotal role in circular bioeconomy. Adoption of biorefineries is a win-win proposition both from the perspective of energy security and waste management. “Biorefining is defined as the sustainable synergetic processing of biomass into a spectrum of marketable food and feed ingredients, products (chemicals, materials) and energy (fuels, power, heat)”. Biorefinery system endeavours to maximize the production of useful products from the biomass. Biorefineries adopt technologies which aim to process the biomass into diverse building blocks. The building blocks are further processed to generate biochemicals and biofuels. The biorefineries are classified based on key features such as (a) feedstocks used in the biorefinery, (b) conversion processes, (c) platform or intermediary products and (d) targeted products. The feedstocks including its characteristics, availability and biodegradability is one of the pertinent factors deciding the sustainability of biorefinery system. The debate between food and fuel has led to the search for second-generation biorefineries, which thrives on non-food biomass. The second-generation biorefineries utilize feedstocks such as residual biomass, lignocellulosic biomass and waste streams. The alternative biomass resources have huge potential for energy generation and can minimize fossil fuel use. Lignocellulose is the most abundant source of unutilised biomass. The positive attributes of lignocellulose biomass are year-round availability of biomass, renewability, sustainability, and amenability to conversion. Nevertheless, lignocellulosic waste biomass requires pretreatment for augmenting the efficiency of the conversion process. Several pretreatment strategies and methods such as physical, chemical and biological methods are adopted to enable lignin deconstruction. The pretreated lignocellulosic biomass through thermochemical conversion (combustion, gasification, hydrothermal processing, liquefaction, pyrolysis) and biochemical conversion are converted into bioenergy, biofuels, speciality chemicals and value-added products. Nevertheless, it is important to assess the impacts of biorefinery on the environment from the perspective of feedstocks, product generation and economic returns. The sustainability of the biorefineries is assessed through the life cycle assessment methodology. Life cycle assessment of biorefineries gains currency on account of (a) technological advancement, (b) bioconversion of diverse feedstocks into value-added products, (c) evaluation of the environmental performance of the biorefineries and (d) validating the sustainable conversion processes. As per ISO 14040, LCA involves four important components, namely goal, scope and functional unit; inventory analysis; impact assessment and interpretation. It has been observed that LCA of lignocellulosic biorefineries is greatly influenced by the methodological attributes, namely the “functional unit”, “system boundaries”, “allocation methods”, LCA approach, etc. LCA studies on lignocellulosic biorefineries reveal that the accuracy and reliability of LCA study are influenced by factors, not limited to data inadequacy, certain assumptions in LCA study and site-specific or local conditions. Though there are challenges to LCA of lignocellulosic waste biorefinery, importance must be placed on the sustainable production of value-added products, efficient utilization of resources, biovalorization and energy efficiency of the biorefinery system. The future research can be directed towards (a) sustainable biorefineries; (b) waste valorization; (c) upscaling the production of value-added products; (d) optimisation of bioconversion processes; (e) sustainable design configuration of the biorefinery; (f) role of biorefineries in the circular economy and (g) contribution of biorefineries in climate change mitigation.
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Venkatramanan, V., Shah, S., Prasad, R., Shah, M. (2021). Life Cycle Assessment of Lignocellulosic Waste Biorefinery. In: Shah, S., Venkatramanan, V., Prasad, R. (eds) Bio-valorization of Waste. Environmental and Microbial Biotechnology. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9696-4_15
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