1 - Overview of sustainable fuel and energy technologies

Abstract

The quest for developing environment-benign technologies to reduce environmental load has made sustainability a necessary and inevitable criterion. Therefore the past few decades of scientific community efforts have been majorly directly toward the development of sustainable technologies for fuel and energy production. Several state-of-the-art technologies have been developed that utilize solar, wind, hydropower, and biorenewable energy. Sustainable fuel and energy technologies can be divided into two broad categories: (1) only energy-producing technologies that include solar, wind, and hydropower technologies, and (2) fuel, energy, and chemical producing technologies that primarily include biomass conversion technologies along with some other emerging routes. Interestingly, fuels, energy, and chemicals producing technologies can further be subdivided into (a) high-temperature biomass conversion technologies, and (b) low-temperature biomass conversion technologies. Therefore an overview of sustainable technologies for fuels and energy production are briefly discussed in this chapter. Furthermore, futuristic approaches, associated challenges, and tentative guidelines are provided to enhance the sustainability of such technologies.