Abstract
The field for application of biomass is rising. The demand for food and feeding stuff rises while at the same time energy, chemicals and other materials also need to be produced from biomass because of decreasing fossil resources. However, the biorefinery ideas and concepts can help to use the limited renewable raw materials more efficiently than today. With biorefineries, valuable products, such as platform chemicals, can be produced from agricultural feedstock, which can subsequently be further processed into a variety of substances by the chemical industry. Due to the role they play as producers of biomass, rural areas will grow in importance in the decades to come. Parts of the biorefinery process can be relocated to the rural areas to bring a high added value to these regions. By refining biomass at the place of production, new economic opportunities may arise for agriculturists, and the industry gets high-grade pre-products. Additionally, an on-farm refining can increase the quality of the products because of the instant processing. To reduce competition with the food production and to find new possibilities of utilisation for these habitats, the focus for new agricultural biomass should be on grasslands. But also croplands can provide more renewable raw materials without endangering a sustainable agriculture, e.g. by implementing legumes in the crop rotation. To decide if a region can provide adequate amounts of raw material for a biorefinery, new raw material assessment procedures have to be developed. In doing so, involvement of farmers is inevitable to generate a reliable study of the biomass refinery potentials.
Highlights
Biomass constitutes a regenerative alternative to fossil resources, which can be used both for energy production and as raw material for further products
Since the mentioned Renewable Energy Sources Act supports the use of biomass for energy production, there is a distorted tendency towards such use to the detriment of other uses, such as for materials, which may be outcompeted
Under-utilised grassland locations are ideal as a raw material source for the use of biomass for materials and energy production, since there is no competition with the production of food and feeding stuff on these sites
Summary
Biomass constitutes a regenerative alternative to fossil resources, which can be used both for energy production and as raw material for further products. Biomass is just one of many possibilities for producing energy from renewable raw materials, these goals induce that political supporting instruments are heavily geared towards the use of biomass for energy production. The chemical industries depend on carbon compounds Their substitute for fossil resources is biomass. The chemical industries aim at achieving a 30% share of production from renewable raw materials by 2025; the current rate stands at approximately 13% (European Technology Platform for Sustainable Chemistry, 2005). The “German Action Plan for the material use of renewable raw materials” (Fachagentur Nachwachsende Rohstoffe e.V.,2009), published by the German government in 2009, illustrates that political supporting programmes will in future embrace the use of biomass for materials, including biorefineries, to advance the efficient use of regenerative raw materials. New ideas and concepts are required to handle the diversified biomass use, and new methods are needed to compare all potential uses of biomass in a region in order to find the most suitable type of use
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