The Renewable Chemicals Industry

uted to a desire to significantly lower the emission of greenhouse gases, thereby minimizing global warming, and also to relinquish our dependence on fossil fuels. Moreover, biomass is the only accessible non-fossil source of carbon that can be processed into liquids that are easily incorporated into the existing transportation fuel infrastructure. In particular, the widespread use of bioethanol and biodiesel as fuel additives is rapidly gaining importance in many parts of the world, and significant efforts are now being devoted to develop technologies that are simultaneously more sustainable than current technologies and allow more efficient use of the available bioresources. In some regions, it appears that bioethanol can indeed already be produced to be cost-competitive with gasoline. [5] However, it also seems that the extensive use of biomass to produce biofuels remains controversial from both an economical and an ecological perspective, and these issues clearly need to be resolved in a fully transparent manner. It is interesting that despite the ongoing efforts to widely introduce biofuels as fuel additives, all prognoses still predict the demand for fossil fuels to increase over the next decades. [6] Consequently, it is clear that there is a strong need to consider if there are other options for substituting fossil resources with bio ACHTUNGTRENNUNG Today, about 85 % of all crude oil consumed is used for the production of transportation fuels, [6] and this is undoubtedly the reason that the production of biofuels attracts most attention when considering renewable alternatives. However, as much as 10 % of crude oil is currently used for the production of industrial chemicals. [6, 7] In general terms, these chemicals are significantly more economically valuable than transportation fuels and, simultaneously, their production often also involves the co-production of significant amounts of carbon dioxide. Taking this into account, it is conspicuous that relatively little attention has been given to develop the use of biomass as a raw material for the production of industrial chemicals. [8] Herein, it is argued that the optimal use of abundant bioACHTUNGTRENNUNG could well serve as a renewable feedstock for the chemical industry. [9] From a chemical perspective, renewable feedstocks, being highly functionalized molecules, are very different from fossil feedstocks which are generally unfunctionalized. Therefore, a huge challenge for chemists today is to provide the chemical industry with a new set of tools to convert renewables into useful chemicals in an economically viable fashion. [10, 11] Here, we illustrate examples of two different approaches or strategies towards potential biomass-derived chemicals. It is proposed that the required cost-competitive and environmentally acceptable (sustainable) industrial chemical processes utilizing renewable starting materials are best achieved by the close integration of biocatalytic and heterogeneous catalytic processes. [12]