The Biorefinery Concept Today

The International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts that world biofuel output will double between 2006 to 2012. That is the primary finding from its recently published Medium-Term Oil Market Report.

According to an article from Biopact based on the report findings:

Technology for significant production of second generation biofuels based on lignocellulosic feedstocks isn't expected by the IEA to come into play by end of the 2012 outlook period.

That is certainly true. But in the meantime, considerable R&D is taking place internationally leading to the deployment of a promising number of pilot, demonstration, and commercial-scale biorefineries.

No agency knows this better than the IEA's own IEA Bioenergy group:

IEA Bioenergy is an organisation set up in 1978 by the International Energy Agency (IEA) with the aim of improving cooperation and information exchange between countries that have national programmes in bioenergy research, development and deployment.

On April 25, 2007, the IEA Bioenergy group's annual meeting, ExCo59, was held in Golden, Colorado bringing the world's experts to the home of the U.S. National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) to discuss the current status of emerging biorefinery technologies. BioPact has provided a real service by summarizing contents of the information presented at ExCo59.


Thankfully, these Biorefinery Concept presentations have been posted as downloadable PDFs on the IEA Bioenergy website. Several of these presentations are identical to those given at the recent BBI Fuel Ethanol Workshop & Expo. Those slides were only distributed to attendees.

technorati BIOconversion, bioenergy, biofuels, ethanol, hydrolysis, syngas, cellulosic, gasification