Distributed biofuels production using semicontinuous chemical processes

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Large-scale biofuel production requires a large geographical area of land to supply the necessary biomass (switchgrass, rapeseed, corn, wood, etc.). However, the larger a production facility gets, the farther biomass has to be transported, leading to increased fuel consumption, environmental impact, and cost of transport. Borrowing from the philosophy of the "buy local food" movement, this waste can be reduced by replacing large facilities with multiple, smaller production facilities distributed over the supporting land area. However, the economies-of-scale of the production facilities themselves do not favor this at present. Therefore, this proposal seeks to develop a new type of production strategy for biofuels, called semicontinuous processing. Semicontinuous processing is a novel processing intensification technique which uses a cyclic operating strategy to perform multiple separation or reaction steps in less equipment than typical continuous operating strategies. This has been shown in other contexts to significantly reduce the costs of operating at smaller scales.