Biomass
resources offer a very promising alternative to fossil
fuels for the sustainable production of electricity, fuels, and chemicals.
Nevertheless, the problem of deciding on the best use of biomass is
highly complex, as many potential feedstocks and conversion pathways
exist, each one displaying different economic and environmental performances.
In this context, here we propose a network approach that combines
economic and several environmental criteria together with resource
availability and demand constraints to identify optimal biomass feedstocks
and their conversion pathways into fuels, chemicals, and electricity.
We apply this methodology to the European Union (EU) considering the
biomass resources currently available and the main technologies for
their conversion into valuable products. Our results show that annual
savings of as much as 1.81 Gt CO2eq could be attained by
exploiting biomass resources, although biomass cannot fully cover
the total EU demand of ethylene, transport fuel, and electricity.
The optimal environmental plan makes use of various biomass resources
for power generation and biofuel production producing ethylene exclusively
from naphtha. The approach presented generates valuable insight to
aid policy-makers on how to sustainably use biomass resources.
Vaccine manufacture currently follows a centralized approach dominated by large‐scale, nonflexible, and product‐specific facilities, which require high investment costs. Emerging vaccine platform technologies, such as RNA vaccines, outer membrane vesicle vaccines with genetically customizable membrane antigens (customOMV), virus‐like particle vaccines with genetically configurable epitopes (customVLP), and humanized yeast‐produced vaccines, as well as new intensified out‐scalable biomanufacturing processes will enable a decentralized manufacturing approach. This is anticipated to be faster to produce, flexible, and implementable at locations with high vaccine demand. In this work, we quantify the potential impact of these technologies on the Kenyan supply chain network. Here, we have employed techno‐economic modeling and mixed integer optimization to investigate the impact of novel vaccine manufacturing technologies on the profitability of supply chain logistics in Kenya. The model results indicate that: (a) manufacturing accounts for the highest proportion of the total supply chain costs, (b) the cost per dose of vaccines produced using emerging platform technologies can be an order of magnitude lower compared to the dose cost of inactivated polio vaccines, and (c) the use of intensified production processes contained inside isolators render small‐scale distributed manufacturing economically viable.
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has become the main approach for the environmental impact assessment of chemicals. Unfortunately, LCA studies often require large amounts of data, time, and resources. To circumvent this limitation, here we propose a streamlined LCA method that predicts the impact of chemicals from molecular descriptors, thermodynamic properties, and surface charge density distributions of molecules (COSMO-based σprofiles). Our approach uses mixed-integer nonlinear models to automatically construct predictive equations of the life cycle impact of chemicals from a set of attributes that are more accesible than full LCA inventories. We applied our method to predict the life cycle impact of 90 chemicals from three attribute sets: 15 molecular descriptors, 12 thermodynamic properties, and discretized σ-profiles. Nine impact categories were estimated, including among others the Global Warming Potential and Eco-Indicator99. Results show that models based on molecular and σ-profile attributes show similar performance to those based on molecular and thermodynamic attributes. This facilitates the application of streamlined LCA when developing new chemicals and processes, avoiding the experimental determination of thermodynamic properties. Furthermore, molecular, thermodynamic, and σ-profile attributes used together provide the most accurate predictions. Overall, this work aims to enhance chemical environmental assessment, facilitating their screening and enhancing the development of more sustainable processes and products.
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