PhD student Jaewon Byun and Professor Jeehoon Han of Jeonbuk National University (School of Semiconductor and Chemical Engineering) are drawing attention from the world academic community by announcing research results that present an integrated evaluation for production of biofuels and chemical products.

This study is expected to greatly help the biorefinery technology in its early stages to accurately assess the sustainability of this industry, thereby eliminating uncertainty in this industry, and to assist in policy making for the bio-industry ecosystem construction.

In recognition of the excellence of this research, it was published as a cover paper in the May 2020 issue of Energy & Environmental Science (IF=33.250), a prominent academic journal in the field of energy and environment. This journal is the world's best in terms of citation index, comparable to Nature, Science and Cell (IF=36~43), the best academic journals in the natural engineering field.

The biorefinery process, which produces multiple products at the same time, involves product diversity and technology complexity, which is a major factor in reducing reliability when evaluating feasibility.

Therefore, in this study, an integrated evaluation technique was developed and applied to 10 practical cases in connection with three existing feasibility studies (technical economic evaluation, life cycle environmental evaluation, and uncertainty evaluation).

The researchers quantified the economic potential and mitigation potential over the entire cycle of the biorefinery process, which simultaneously produces ethanol (the transport fuel) and various chemical products (adipic acid, caprolactam, pentanediol, phthalic anhydride and furandicarboxylic acid) from the corn stover. 

In addition, the team finally estimated the economic mitigation potential and reflected the uncertainty to evaluate the possibility of replacing biofuels developed in individual cases with fossil fuels.

Among the ten examples suggested in this study, the researchers confirmed that the optimum results are obtained when ethanol and furandicarboxylic acid are produced simultaneously.

Also, through the feasibility assessments, such as bottlenecks, it was suggested that in order to secure the validity of the biorefinery technology in the future, it is necessary to increase the scale of the process and to develop a conversion technology that can improve the yield.

“This study is a breakthrough to solve the reliability problem of the feasibility assessment result, which is the main basis for the development and policy decision-making, which is attracting attention as a key technology for reducing greenhouse gases in the future," said Professor Han, the research director. “It is expected to greatly contribute to speeding up the commercialization of unused carbon source resource technology in addition to the biorefinery process.”