The production of fuels and chemicals in the new world: critical analysis of the choice between crude oil and biomass vis-à-vis sustainability and the environment

Abstract

Energy and the environment are intimately related and hotly debated issues. Today’s crude oil-based economy for the manufacture of fuels, chemicals and materials will not have a sustainable future. The over-use of oil products has done a great damage to the environment. Faced with the twin challenges of sustaining socioeconomic development and shrinking the environmental footprint of chemicals and fuel manufacturing, a major emphasis is on either converting biomass into low-value, high-volume biofuels or refining it into a wide spectrum of products. Using carbon for fuel is a flawed approach and unlikely to achieve any nation’s socioeconomic or environmental targets. Biomass is chemically and geographically incompatible with the existing refining and pipeline infrastructure, and biorefining and biofuels production in their current forms will not achieve economies of scale in most nations. Synergistic use of crude oil, biomass, and shale gas to produce fuels, value-added chemicals, and commodity chemicals, respectively, can continue for some time. However, carbon should not be used as a source of fuel or energy but be valorized to other products. In controlling CO2 emissions, hydrogen will play a critical role. Hydrogen is best suited for converting waste biomass and carbon dioxide emanated from different sources, whether it be fossil fuel-derived carbon or biomass-derived carbon, into fuels and chemicals as well as it will also lead, on its own as energy source, to the carbon negative scenario in conjunction with other renewable non-carbon sources. This new paradigm for production of fuels and chemicals not only offers the greatest monetization potential for biomass and shale gas, but it could also scale down output and improve the atom and energy economies of oil refineries. We have also highlighted the technology gaps with the intention to drive R&D in these directions. We believe this article will generate a considerable debate in energy sector and lead to better energy and material policy across the world. Graphic abstract

Economic efficiency of resource recovery—analysis of time-dependent changes on sustainability perception of waste management scenarios

“…Economic functions presented in Table 1 define the mostly used waste gasification system, while additional costs for production of ethanol are modelled based on literature data (US Department of Energy 2010) and also presented in Table 6. Even though it is not that common in municipal WM practices to use waste for ethanol production, while electricity can be easily generated from renewable energy sources (Saad et al 2018), ethanol produced from waste can replace fossil fuels in the transportation sector without the need for biomass use (Yadav et al 2020). Using the previously described LCA model and CED LCIA data from the Ecoinvent database percentages of recovered primary energy which was embodied in the collected waste streams are calculated -Table 7.…”

Investigating best available technique for CO2 chemical absorption: solvent selection based on empirical surrogate model and exergy loss

“…Currently, the concentration of CO 2 in the atmosphere is at its highest level according to available records in the past 800,000 years: before the industrial revolution, the CO 2 atmospheric concentration did not exceed 300 ppm, but at present exceeds 400 ppm (Ritchie and Roser 2020). Yadav et al (2020) claim that carbon should not be used as a source of fuel or energy but be valorised to other products. As currently a large proportion of the energy produced comes from combustion, some other authors propose the biofixation of CO 2 from the exhaust gases, e.g.…”

Direct catalytic production of dimethyl ether from CO and CO2: A review

“…Finding credible and economical sources of energy depends on converting various waste materials, wasting energy and finding new sources [6]. Developed countries are now replacing conventional petroleum oils with fuels such as biofuels, hydrogen, natural gas, and dimethyl ether (typically abbreviated as DME) [7,8]. It is an organic compound with the formula CH3OCH3, a colorless, volatile, and noncorrosive gas with safe storage and handling that is currently being demonstrated for use in a variety of fuel applications [9].…”