ABSTRACT
“Bioeconomy” is an ambiguous term but the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development has offered a broad and uncontentious definition: “the aggregate set of economic operations in a society that use the latent value incumbent in biological products and processes to capture new growth and welfare benefits for citizens and nations”. The upward trend in oil prices from 2000 helped to increase commercial interest and investment in biofuels, which remained high in this era despite the short-lived dip in oil prices in the post-2007 recession. The large-scale production of the so-called first-generation biofuels is a mature and global industrial sector using mostly food crops for ethanol and a widening portfolio of plant and animal fats and oils for the methyl esters that constitute biodiesel. The essential link is that biofuels as molecules can function as feedstocks for other and sequential processes.
