Process Systems Engineering for Biofuels Development

1Introduction

Adrián Bonilla‐Petriciolet¹ and Gade Pandu Rangaiah^{2, 3}

¹ Instituto Tecnológico de Aguascalientes, Aguascalientes 20256, Mexico

² Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, National University of Singapore, 117585, Singapore

³ School of Chemical Engineering, Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore 632014, India

1.1 Importance of Biofuels and Overview of their Production

The relevance and importance of biofuels are recognized worldwide, mainly due to the problems caused by fossil fuel depletion and environmental pollution (e.g. climate change) arising from the generation and consumption of traditional energy sources (Li et al. 2019; Raud et al. 2019; Quiroz‐Perez et al. 2019). Biofuels belong to the category of sustainable energy that can be obtained from biological (e.g. anaerobic digestion and fermentation), physicochemical (e.g. transesterification), and thermochemical (e.g. liquefaction, gasification, and pyrolysis) processing routes, which can involve the application of conventional and intensified technologies (Gutierrez‐Antonio et al. 2017; Li et al. 2019; Quiroz‐Perez et al. 2019). Several researchers have concluded that biomasses can be regarded as a primary source for obtaining green and renewable energy because they are distributed and generated worldwide (Li et al. 2019; Quiroz‐Perez et al. 2019; Wei et al. 2019). In fact, it has been estimated that the biomass‐based fuel sources can account for 70% of all renewable energy production (Raud ...