Green and sustainable manufacture of chemicals from biomass: state of the art

The various strategies for the valorisation of waste biomass to platform chemicals, and the underlying developments in chemical and biological catalysis which make this possible, are critically reviewed. The option involving the least changes to the status quo is the drop-in strategy of complete deoxygenation to petroleum hydrocarbons and further processing using existing technologies. The alternative, redox economic approach, is direct conversion of, for example, carbohydrates to oxygenates by fermentation or chemocatalytic processes. Examples of both approaches are described, e.g. fermentation of carbohydrates to produce hydrocarbons, lower alcohols, diols and carboxylic acids or acid catalyzed hydrolysis of…