Encyclopedia of Renewable Energy. James G. Speight

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      Biomass Fuel

      Solid biofuels such as wood or dried dung have been used since man learned to control fire. On the other hand, liquid biofuels for industrial applications was used since the early days of the car industry.

      Nikolaus August Otto, the inventor of the combustion engine, conceived his invention to run on ethanol, while Rudolf Diesel, the inventor of the diesel engine, conceived it to run on peanut oil. Henry Ford originally had designed the Ford Model T, a car produced between 1903 and 1926, to run completely on ethanol, and the desire to mass produce electric cars did not come to fruition at that time. However, when crude oil began being cheaply extracted from deeper in the soil (thanks to oil reserves discovered in Pennsylvania and Texas), cars began using fuels from oil.

      Nevertheless, before World War II, biofuels were seen as providing an alternative to imported oil in countries such as Germany, which sold a blend of gasoline with alcohol fermented from potatoes under the name Reichskraftsprit. In Britain, grain alcohol was blended with gasoline by the Distillers Company Ltd under the name Discol. After the World War II, cheap Middle Eastern oil lessened interest in biofuels. Then, with the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979, there was an increase in interests from governments and academics in biofuels. However, interest decreased with the counter-shock of 1986 that made oil prices cheaper again. However, the variation in the price of crude oil continues and is subject to political pressures from oil-producing countries.

      The supply of crude oil, the basic feedstock for refineries and for the petrochemicals industry, is finite, and its dominant position will become unsustainable as supply/demand issues erode its economic advantage over other renewable feedstocks. This situation will be mitigated to some extent by the exploitation of more technically challenging fossil resources and the introduction of new technologies for fuels and chemicals production from natural gas and coal.

However, the use of fossil resources at current rates will have serious and irreversible consequences for the global climate. Consequently, there is a renewed interest in the utilization of plant-based matter as a raw material feedstock for the chemicals industry. Plants accumulate carbon from the atmosphere via photosynthesis, and the widespread utilization of these materials as basic inputs into the generation of power, fuels, and chemicals is a viable route to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

      Thus, the crude oil and petrochemicals industries are coming under increasing pressure not only to compete effectively with global competitors utilizing more advantaged hydrocarbon feedstocks but also to ensure that its processes and products comply with increasingly stringent environmental legislation.

      The production of fuels and chemicals from renewable plant-based feedstocks utilizing state-of-the-art conversion technologies presents an opportunity to maintain competitive advantage and contribute to the attainment of national environmental targets. Bioprocessing routes have a number of compelling advantages over conventional petrochemicals production; however, it is only in the last decade that rapid progress in biotechnology has facilitated the commercialization of a number of plant-based chemical processes. It is widely recognized that further significant production of plant-based chemicals will only be economically viable in highly integrated and efficient production complexes producing a diverse range of chemical products. This biorefinery concept is analogous to conventional oil refineries and petrochemical complexes that have evolved over many years to maximize process synergies, energy integration, and feedstock utilization to drive down production costs.

      See also: Biofuels, Biomass.