ABSTRACT
Chemicals have been produced from biomass in the past, are being produced at present, and will be produced in the future wherever technical utility and economic conditions have combined or will combine to make it feasible. Realistic appraisals of the true availability of biomass fall somewhere in between. Before the era of petrochemicals, various chemicals were produced from biomass by such techniques as extraction, fermentation, and pyrolysis. Since the energy crisis of 1973, considerable interest has developed in the use of biomass to help meet the energy budget of the world. Critics of chemicals from biomass point to the unfavorable ratio of carbon to oxygen in biomass for chemical synthesis and the low energy trajectory efficiency for producing liquid fuels from wood. Biomass substrates used for fermentation ethanol were sucrose, molasses, starch, or cellulose hydrolyzates. However, the production of industrial ethanol by fermentation was virtually completely displaced by hydration of ethylene.
