| Περίληψη: | The petroleum-based system is currently facing global crisis, such as climate change and fossil resource depletion. Moreover, the increasing demand for better and more versatile products and growing global population require innovative solutions regarding the way products and services are provided to society. Thus, the move towards a bio-based economy, where production and use of materials and energy are taking place in a responsible and environmentally friendly manner, is necessary. The overall objective is to accelerate the conversion of fossil-based industries to low carbon, resource efficient and sustainable ones. Taking advantage of these potential benefits requires building a broad knowledge base and developing relevant biotechnologies, focusing mainly on three essential elements: 1) transforming current fossil-based processes into resource and energy efficient biotechnology-based ones, 2) establishing reliable, sustainable, and appropriate supply chains of biomass, byproducts and waste streams and a wide network of biorefineries throughout world and 3) supporting market development for bio-based products and processes, taking account of the associated risks and benefits. An important goal is to expand the range and the volume of innovative products manufactured by the bio-based industries (e.g. bio-based plastics, chemical building blocks, high value ingredients for pharmaceuticals or cosmetics, advanced biofuels) from renewable biological resources (e.g. specialty crops, residues from agriculture, forestry, fisheries and the utilisation of biowaste). This will require the development of new types of biorefineries and the associated value chains as well as innovation within established bio-based industries with a long tradition of processing renewable biological resources (e.g. the pulp and paper industry, the starch and the food industry).
The production of chemicals and fuels through microbial bioconversion technologies using renewable resources has attracted significant attention from both industry and academia. This attention has resulted in a plethora of experimental investigations on the potential of producing specific intracellular or extracellular products that can serve as sustainable drop-in substitutes for unsustainable chemicals derived from fossil resources. However, the adoption of bioconversion technologies from the industry has been very limited and recently a number of expensive failures to reach the production stage have been reported. These failures have resulted in a pressing need to develop tools that can support all stages of the commercialization of microbial bioconversion technologies that range from strain modification to equipment scaleup and technoeconomic analysis.
This thesis aims at presenting such tools that can be used to design and simulate the biotransformation and the recovery sections of biobased chemicals. Additionally, the tools that will be developed should be able to execute quantitative risk analysis across multiple technology options and expose venture’s risks. The overall objective is to develop a novel framework which can be utilized to quantify the bio-based technologies that can successfully achieve the commercialization stage. To achieve the stated objective, quantitative methods such as mathematical programming, simulation, techno-economic analysis, and probability analysis will be used.
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