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Sub-Saharan African countries present chronic energy shortages and heavy reliance on oil imports for diesel. The small demand and high production costs in some countries have compromised the economic feasibility of the biodiesel industry in the region. Therefore, to overcome these limitations a model of “multi-countries” cooperated production and consumption of biodiesel was proposed for a group of seven neighboring countries. The model explored linear programming and simulations to the problem of minimizing biodiesel production costs considering different types of production and demand restrictions. The data processing was realized using the Solver and Linear Interactive Discrete Optimizer software (LINDO). The simulations and scenarios revealed that palm oil is the crop that minimize the production costs (US$0.82/liter) and that, although jatropha was classified in the second place (US$1.05/L), it is the crop with the biggest job creation potential (5.0 times that of the palm oil seeds). These results reveal the presence of a trade-off in the strategy and the choice between different oilseeds: (a) to produce biodiesel from the crop with minimal costs (palm oil) or (b) to choose the one that has the biggest potential for job creation (jatropha). Considering the diesel price between US$0.60 and US$1.14/L at service stations in the region in 2016, both the biodiesel from palm oil and jatropha will need subsidies and fiscal incentives (tax reductions) to be competitive in the fuel market (diesel). The volume of biodiesel to supply the B10 demand in 2031 has the potential to reduce US$ 1.98 billion/year of the expenses on oil imports. It is worth observing that this decision-support model adds the “multi-countries” cooperation perspective as a contribution to the methodological and political approaches about biofuels production and consumption and can be exploited as a starting point for the formulation of policies, strategies, and investment decisions for the establishment of biodiesel production programs.

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Biomass has been profiled as a potential source of a portfolio of value-added products and energy vectors with applications in different industrial sectors. The Territory of the Southern Coast of Bahia (TSC) in Brazil has a high potential to provide agricultural and forest biomass to small and medium-scale biorefineries. The Territory of the Southern Coast of Bahia (TSC) in Brazil has a high potential to provide agricultural and forest biomass for these bioindustries. This work aims to quantify the biomass of the main agricultural crops of the TSC over the period of 1999 to 2019. For this purpose, the biomass classification in the Municipal Agricultural Production (PAM) of the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) was used, according to its applications in pharmaceutical industries and other industries using the Classification and Regression Tree (CART) algorithm. Moreover, the identification of the main forest species of the Atlantic Forest that can supply bio-based products was included. Thus, a time series analysis was performed. Biomass classification was performed with the inverted tree using the Gini Index. The results indicate that banana production (1.3 Mt) exceeded, over a period of 20 years, cocoa production (1.1 Mt). This occurs despite the higher occupying area of cocoa (5.8 million hectares) compared with that of bananas. Coffee biomass has been profiled as a raw material to be upgraded in various industries, while bananas are oriented toward supplying inputs for the pharmaceutical industry. Forest species also have the potential to be used in the pharmaceutical industry. In conclusion, small and medium-scale biorefineries can help to increase the use of agricultural and forest biomass as a way of providing inputs for several industries and guaranteeing positive social impacts for the population.

Multi-product biorefineries are very promising industries to diversify the economy of countries since they have a productive matrix with a biological characteristic capable of processing various types of biomass with applications in pharmaceutical, renewable energy, and other industries. In this context, this research carries out an analysis of the literature on biorefineries and the methods of assessing social impacts that consider quality of life, employment, and stakeholders, among other metrics, as guided by the United Nations – UN. A systematic review combined with bibliometric, semantic, and content analysis was carried out by searching scientific documents in the Scopus and Web of Science databases. A total of 116 articles were located, of which twenty-three were selected by three researchers to compose the research. The Fleiss Kappa Index was applied to verify the agreement of the evaluators' decision regarding the inclusion and exclusion of articles, they obtained K = 0.43 above the tolerable limit defined for the inclusion of articles, which is K ≥ 0.21Therefore, all twenty-three articles were included. The results indicate that most biorefinery projects consider optimization and econometric methods and especially the employment metric, therefore, understood as insufficient for assessing social impacts. On the other hand, projects whose methods consider Social Life Cycle and Multicriteria are more consistent for assessing the social impacts of biorefineries, as they allow an analysis of qualitative and significant information.