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Bio‐based succinic acid is a potential building block for the production of renewable chemicals and polymers. The use of hemicellulosic hydrolyzate from sugarcane bagasse allows production of succinic acid without competing with food chains and increasing the biomass ‐aggregated value. This work assesses the economic impacts of integrating the production of ‐succinic acid on an optimized sugarcane biorefinery with the production of first‐generation ethanol and electricity. Process simulation was performed to obtain mass and energy balances of the entire process, from bagasse pre‐treatment to pentose fermentation and succinic acid recovery, using several pieces of technical information and data taken from the scientific literature. After ‐assessing the impacts of key economic variables through risk analysis, the obtained results were benchmarked against those of an optimized ethanol distillery. Calculated succinic acid production cost was US$ 2.32/kg, comparable to costs related to less expensive sugar sources. The integrated succinic acid biorefinery presented a slightly lower internal rate of return (IRR) compared to an ‐ethanol distillery. However, even when considering uncertainties, succinic acid production has a strong probability (84.6%) of achieving an IRR higher than 12%. © 2017 Society of Chemical Industry and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

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-Furfural is a base chemical with a wide range of applications and with a great opportunity for market growth in the near term. Derived from biomass, its production may be incorporated to the Brazilian chemical industry using sugarcane bagasse as feedstock. In this context, the integration of a furfural plant to a first generation bioethanol facility, within the biorefinery concept, was simulated considering different scenarios compared to an autonomous bioethanol distillery. The economic analysis of the different scenarios showed that the revenues from furfural commercialization increase the internal rate of return of the project for maximum furfural production (22.0%) in comparison to a conventional ethanol distillery (13.5%), despite the decrease in electricity output. Moreover, the economic analysis of the results pointed out the possibility of lowering furfural prices to levels that could lead to its use as a precursor for biofuels.

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Process integration is an interesting option to reduce costs and improve the economic viability of new processes in sugarcane mills. Brazil has a prolific sugar‐energy sector, with hundreds of sugarcane mills that could possibly act as sources of carbon, energy, and water for annexed plants. While many studies analyze the integration of new technologies into sugarcane biorefineries as greenfield plants, the assessment and establishment of integrated processes into existing plants will help detecting process bottlenecks and enabling the required levels of integration to be better understood prior to designing a full‐scale, greenfield biorefinery. The present review provides an overview of the possibilities for sugarcane mills to diversify the portfolio of products from sugarcane biomass – beyond ethanol, sugar, and electric energy. The work initially considers the integrated production of market‐ready sugarcane‐derived products, such as animal feed, industrial salts, and hydrocarbons in existing Brazilian plants. Finally, the study outlines the prospects for future integration of non‐traditional process alternatives in sugarcane mills, namely bioplastics, organic acids, molecular hydrogen, and advanced lignocellulosic compounds. © 2019 Society of Chemical Industry and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Technical, economic and environmental aspects of implementing two-phase anaerobic digestion (AD), i.e., acidogenic þ methanogenic systems, in sugarcane biorefineries for the treatment of vinasse were assessed based on different strategies to using the hydrogen-rich biogas (biogas-H 2 ) generated via acidogenesis. Phase separation greatly enhanced the bioenergy recovered from vinasse AD compared with single-phase systems (methanogenic phase exclusively). The best results for generating electric energy were observed in combined cycle-based power plants that utilized biohythane (10.8 MW þ 5.5 MW for the harvest and inter-harvest, respectively), which is the gaseous biofuel from blending biogas-H 2 with the methane-rich stream from the methanogenic phase (biogas-CH 4 ). Moreover, the results of this study indicated that scaling up two-phase AD systems is economically feasible for the treatment of sugarcane vinasse (net present value ¼ USD 208.58e219.86 million) because a better or equivalent economic performance was attained compared with single-phase processes. Optimizing the alkalinization of methanogenic reactors strongly affected both the economic and environmental performance of the process, with better results observed with the use of low sodium hydroxide dosages (4 g NaOH kg À1 COD). In summary, our results highlighted that two-phase biodigestion may enhance energy production from vinasse by 20e30% without impairing the profitability of the biorefinery and could lead to slight improvements in the environmental performance of the ethanol production chain via the use of an optimized alkalinization strategy.