Concerns linked to climate change and Europe’s excessive dependency on fossil resources is driving European society towards a new bioeconomy that will use biomass as its primary source of carbon and energy. In this respect, biomass is completely unique, because it is the only naturally renewable energy source that can also supply carbon for the production of the chemicals and products that are vital for our daily life. Nevertheless, experience gained from 1stgeneration biorefining has clearly revealed the limits of using food grain crops, such as maize or wheat, as feedstocks and has opened a whole new debate centered on just how feasible biorefining really is, in particular from a European perspective.
The EU project BIOCORE, managed by INRA, was originally built to conceive and demonstrate the industrial feasibility of a biorefinery concept. From the outset, this project was designed to avoid the use of food commodities, choosing instead cereal by-products (straws etc), forestry products and short rotation woody crops as feedstocks. Similarly, BIOCORE’s strategy obeys a principle of resource efficiency, applying fractionation technologies that maximize the extraction of molecules from biomass and transformation technologies that first privilege the production of chemicals or even food ingredients, before focusing on fuels and energy production.
BIOCORE has now been running for 3 years and a number of results have now been acquired. Therefore, in this presentation, I will first discuss some of the challenges of biorefining, relating my views to the current context, and then present some highlights of BIOCORE’s successes, including the sugar-based production of 2ndgeneration fuels and chemicals, as well as some details of case studies that have been performed in both Europe and India.
