New Technologies Bio-Refinery as the Bio-Inspired Process to Bulk Chemicals Johan Sanders, * Elinor Scott, Ruud Weusthuis, Hans Mooibroek Introduction Anticipated climate changes presum- ably caused by greenhouse gasses, security of energy supply, and high and fluctuating energy prices, are decisive factors for finding alternative energy sources and ways to increase the energy efficiency of processes for the production of heat, electricity, transportation fuels, and chemicals. Global energy consumption is anti- cipated to increase almost three-fold within the next 50 years as judged Essay This paper describes several examples of knowledge-intensive technologies for the production of chemicals from biomass, which take advantage of the biomass structure in a more efficient way than the production of fuels or electricity alone. The depletion in fossil feedstocks, increasing oil prices, and the ecological problems associated with CO 2 emissions are forcing the development of alternative resources for energy, transport fuels, and chemicals, such as the replacement of fossil resources with CO 2 neutral biomass. Allied with this is the conversion of crude oil products utilizes pri- mary products (ethylene, etc.) and their conversion into either materials or (functional) chemi- cals with the aid of co-reagents such as ammonia, by various process steps to introduce func- tionalities such as -NH 2 into the simple structures of the primary products. Conversely, many products found in biomass often contain functionalities. Therefore, it is attractive to exploit this in order to by-pass the use, and preparation of, co-reagents as well as to eliminate various process steps by utilizing suitable biomass-based precursors for the production of chemicals. } J. Sanders, E. Scott, R. Weusthuis, H. Mooibroek Wageningen University and Research Centre; Department of Valorisation of Plant Production Chains, P.O. Box 17, 6700 AA Wageningen, The Netherlands Fax: þ31 317 475347; E-mail: johan.sanders@wur.nl Macromol. Biosci. 2007, 7, 105–117 ß 2007 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim DOI: 10.1002/mabi.200600223 105