THE BIOMASS AS ALTERNATIVE TO PETROLEUM FOR CHEMICAL PRODUCTS OBTENTION: ACETONE AND ETHANOL AS PLATFORM MOLECULES

The potential of biomass as a source of chemical products is presented in this work. The concept of biorefinery is analyzed, considering that the integration of biofuels and chemicals is necessary to guarantee the technical and economic viability. Two main platform molecules are evaluated: the ethanol and the acetone, analyzing the most promising processes to obtain a high variety of products with high value in chemical, pharmaceutical and food industries. Despite most of these processes were firstly proposed more than 50 years ago , the need of petroleum replacement as raw material for most of the chemicals has motivated new researches to focus on some parameters that limit their implementation in an industrial scale. The optimization of heterogeneous catalysts is one of the key parameters in these studies