A Total Site Synthesis approach for the selection, integration and planning of multiple-feedstock biorefineries

Biorefineries promote promising and exciting routes to exploit biomass and organic resources into a wide range of fuels and chemicals. Value chains include multiple, complex and competitive pathways that may lead to numerous intermediates and end-user chemicals. Process and path integration are critical pre-requisites for sustainable production as biorefineries are challenged to compete with well-developed and mature fossil-based multiple-product industries. The access of biomass adds further challenges as regional supplies remain volatile, are time-variant and differ both in composition and volume. Conventional integration methods, by means of Total Site Integration, are unsuitable for screening as production capacities and product portfolios represent degrees of freedom. This paper introduces a new concept and novel representations able to cope with the new challenges by simultaneously searching for product portfolios and using energy integration. The approach leads to mathematical models formulated as optimization problems that could be reliably solved without practical limitations on the number of products, feedstocks and pathways. The methodology is illustrated in small and medium-size problems before it is finally demonstrated on a real-life lignocellulosic biorefinery with 21 candidate paths and 6 different feedstocks. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.