Small and medium-scale biorefineries: Biomass quantification and its bioeconomic potential in the Southern Coastal Territory of Bahia

Abstract

Biomass has been profiled as a potential source of a portfolio of value-added products and energy vectors with applications in different industrial sectors. The Territory of the Southern Coast of Bahia (TSC) in Brazil has a high potential to provide agricultural and forest biomass to small and medium-scale biorefineries. The Territory of the Southern Coast of Bahia (TSC) in Brazil has a high potential to provide agricultural and forest biomass for these bioindustries. This work aims to quantify the biomass of the main agricultural crops of the TSC over the period of 1999 to 2019. For this purpose, the biomass classification in the Municipal Agricultural Production (PAM) of the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) was used, according to its applications in pharmaceutical industries and other industries using the Classification and Regression Tree (CART) algorithm. Moreover, the identification of the main forest species of the Atlantic Forest that can supply bio-based products was included. Thus, a time series analysis was performed. Biomass classification was performed with the inverted tree using the Gini Index. The results indicate that banana production (1.3 Mt) exceeded, over a period of 20 years, cocoa production (1.1 Mt). This occurs despite the higher occupying area of cocoa (5.8 million hectares) compared with that of bananas. Coffee biomass has been profiled as a raw material to be upgraded in various industries, while bananas are oriented toward supplying inputs for the pharmaceutical industry. Forest species also have the potential to be used in the pharmaceutical industry. In conclusion, small and medium-scale biorefineries can help to increase the use of agricultural and forest biomass as a way of providing inputs for several industries and guaranteeing positive social impacts for the population.