Biorefining; a major opportunity for the sugar cane industry.

Biorefining is now the subject of accelerating interest and awareness, particularly in North America and Europe. This interest is being driven strongly by enhanced environmental concerns that encourage the use of renewable chemicals and liquid fuels and discourage net greenhouse gas emissions. Perhaps of even greater recent urgency has been the geo-political, economic and environmental dangers arising from the exploration, production, transportation and usage of the fossil carbon sources - coal, crude oil and natural gas. Fuel ethanol production, for several decades the primary domain of Brazil through its Proalcool program, is accelerating rapidly in the United States with the active encouragement of government policies and now stimulated by profit-motivated commercial interests. Currently, the raw materials used for most fuel ethanol production are crops traditionally grown for food and feed purposes; cane sugar and molasses in Brazil and corn in the United States. While this strongly developing market for these crops is potentially beneficial to the farmers and growers, who now find markets for their persistent crop surpluses, the enormous disparity in the potential demand for renewable chemicals and fuels and the availability of surplus crops, forces this nascent industry to look elsewhere for a secure and perhaps more price-stable supply of raw materials. The obvious choice is lignocellulosic biomass in the form of agricultural crop and wood residues and even deliberately grown woody annual crops grown on surplus agricultural land. However, lignocellulosic biomass has been shown to require various forms of pretreatment before the cellulose and hemicellulose can be converted in high yield to fermentable sugars. Some pretreatment technologies simply allow recovery of sugars and assign all remaining components of the raw material to use as low-grade boiler fuel. In fact, these other components, especially lignin, can have commercial values significantly greater than the fermentable sugars obtained from the cellulose and hemicellulose. Future biorefineries, based on developing technology, have the opportunity to recovery almost every chemical component of woody biomass and sell each of them into their highest value markets. In this way biorefineries mirror the operations of crude oil refineries in which a relatively low value raw material is fractionated and refined to produce a range of value-added products. The benefits of this business strategy is that the economics of the business depend less on the value of one individual product but more on the combined value of all products. As with crude oil refineries, biorefineries would be most profitable when they are flexible enough to process a varied raw material and can modify their processes to allow a mix of products that can be changed in response to changing market conditions.