Multicriteria evaluation of biomass residues in Portugal to second generation bioethanol production

Abstract

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Thematic Section -Future of Energy-efficient Operations and Production Systems IntroductionOvercoming the problem of global warming and pollution due to fossil fuel consumption is imperative and one of the greatest challenges of our times. Increasing the global energy production from renewable sources by 2030 to combat climate change and minimize its impacts on populations around the world is vital, reason why European legislation established the goal of improving energy efficiency by 32.5% until 2030 (Energy Efficiency Directive 2012/27/EU, recently amended to Directive (EU) 2018/2002) (Trotta, 2019). With this in mind, in accordance with the policies and the targets defined and approved internationally by different countries, it was decided to incorporate until 2030 between 20% and 30% of ethanol in gasoline (Jahid et al., 2018).When ethanol is produced by alcoholic fermentation process, mediated by yeasts, filamentous fungi, or bacteria from simple sugars, namely pentoses, C5 (i.e., xylose), or hexoses, C6 (i.e., glucose), and it is not provided by oil refineries, it is called bioethanol (Rosa, 2006). Bioethanol has increasingly emerged on the market as the biofuel