Synthesis of sustainable integrated biorefinery via reaction pathway synthesis: Economic,incremental enviromental burden and energy assessment with multiobjective optimization

With the increasing attention toward sustainable development, biomass has been identified as one of the most promising sources of renewable energy. To convert biomass into value‐added products and energy, an integrated processing facility, known as an integrated biorefinery is needed. To date, various biomass conversion systems such as gasification, pyrolysis, anaerobic digestion and fermentation are well established. Due to a large number of technologies available, systematic synthesis of a sustainable integrated biorefinery which simultaneously considers economic performance, environmental impact, and energy requirement is a challenging task. To address this issue, multiobjective optimization approaches are used in this work to synthesize a sustainable integrated biorefinery. In addition, a novel approach (incremental environmental burden) to assess the environmental impact for an integrated biorefinery is presented. To illustrate the proposed approach, a palm‐based biomass case study is solved. © 2014 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J, 61: 132–146, 2015