Biomass Industrial Products
At the turn of the century, most nonfuel industrial products—dyes, inks, paints, medicines, chemicals, clothing, synthetic fibers, and plastics—were made from trees, vegetables, or crops. By the 1970s, organic chemicals derived from petroleum had largely replaced those derived from plant matter, capturing more than 95 percent of the markets previously held by products made from biological resources, and petroleum accounted for more than 70 percent of our fuels (Morris and Ahmed, 1992). However, recent developments are raising the prospects that many petrochemically derived products can be replaced with industrial materials processed from renewable resources (Kaminsky 2004). Scientists and engineers continue to make progress in research and development of technologies that reduce the real cost of processing plant matter into value-added products. Simultaneously, environmental concerns and legislation are intensifying the interest in agricultural and forestry resources as alternative feedstocks. Sustained growth of this developing industry will depend on developing new markets and cost-competitive bio-based industrial products (Morris and Ahmed 1992).
Numerous opportunities are emerging to expand industrial needs through the production and processing of biological materials. Todays bio-based products include commodity and specialty chemicals, fuels, and materials. Some of these products result from the direct physical or chemical processing of biomass—cellulose, starch, oils, protein, lignin, and terpenes. Others are indirectly processed from carbohydrates by biotechnologies such as microbial and enzymatic processing. The gross annual sales of these biochemicals in 1994 exceeded $13 billion US (Datta, 1994). Analyses of historical and present market growth rates suggest that the worldwide market for specialty chemicals will grow 16 percent per year (Datta, 1994).
A wide range of bio-based industrial products and technologies will be introduced to diverse industrial markets. Ethanol and oxygenated chemicals derived from fermentable sugars will be key precursors to other industrial chemicals traditionally dependent on petroleum feedstocks. In the long term, with advances in genetic engineering and large-scale fuel production from lignocellulosic plant materials may become cost competitive with petroleum fuels(RBEP 2004). In other cases, bio-based technologies such as enzyme catalysts are promising replacements for more hazardous industrial chemical processes. Increasingly, niche markets will be sought for a wide array of custom-engineered plant polymers not available in petrochemical-based products(Stricker and Smith 2004).
KEY BIOBASED PRODUCT AREAS:
Encyclopedia ID: p1184
