Process systems engineering studies for the synthesis of catalytic biomass-to-fuels strategies

•We synthesize five biomass-to-fuels catalytic conversion strategies.•Our studies aid in the identification of the major bottlenecks and cost drivers.•We discuss how process systems engineering can guide future basic research.

The goal of this paper is to show how chemical process synthesis and analysis studies can be coupled with experimental heterogeneous catalysis studies to identify promising research directions for the development of strategies for the production of renewable fuels. We study five catalytic biomass-to-fuels strategies that rely on production of platform chemicals, such as levulinic acid and fermentable sugars. We first integrate catalytic conversion subsystems with separation subsystems to generate complete conversion strategies, and we then develop the corresponding process simulation models based on experimental results. Our analyses suggest that catalytic biomass-to-fuel conversion strategies could become economically competitive alternatives to current biofuel production approaches as a result of iterative experimental and computational efforts.