Innovative developments in biofuels production from organic waste materials: A review

Abstract

Several organic wastes into energy conversion technologies were successful in addressing global challenges such as fossil fuel dependency, production cost optimization, waste management and emission control issues. The utilization of organic wastes for biofuels production is considered as a plausible approach for achieving better energy security, pollution control, process economics, sustainable production, and societal improvements. This work intends to comprehensively review all available technologies for producing biofuels from organic wastes. Besides, it presents a synoptic analysis of the status, prospects and challenges pertinent to each technology. Globally, liquid biofuels are gaining prominence because of their potential to reduce the consumption of fossil fuels in transportation and industrial sectors with comparable performance efficiencies. This review work demonstrates the superiority of biodiesel over other liquid biofuels through a comparative assessment of relevant factors. Some of the main constraints for commercial deployment of biodiesel production using organic wastes include higher production costs, higher energy consumption, longer reaction residence times, and unsystematic feedstock accumulation procedures. The process intensification methods implemented by various researchers to circumvent these biodiesel production challenges are also presented. Moreover, this article recommends a novel concept for intensification of biodiesel production from waste cooking oil using coalescer reactor along with a preliminary scrutiny for justifying further research potential of the approach.