Recent developments on the catalytic technologies for the transformation of biomass into biofuels: A patent survey

The need for replacing mineral fuels is promoting an increasing interest for developing alternatives fuels. Biomass (especially whole biomass) is presented as the most promising alternative to obtain liquid fuels for the transport sector. In good agreement with this fact, many research groups have focused their efforts on new processes for obtaining fuels from biomass developing biological, thermochemical and chemical routes. Chemical routes, and the catalytic ones in particular, allow obtaining a high variety of fuels using almost all the biomass fractions. There are some reviews about advances on this field published in scientific papers, but inventions related to this topic have not been deeply analyzed yet. The analysis of these inventions is a good starting point to consider the current situation and to identify the aspects to be optimized before considering this application as an actual opportunity to solve the energy problem. The aim of this review is to discuss in detail the recent patents about new advances in catalytic routes for obtaining biofuels from biomass.