Challenges & Opportunities on Catalytic Conversion of Glycerol to Value Added Chemicals

Abstract

With the rapid expansion of biodiesel industry, its main by-product, crude glycerol, is anticipated to reach a global production of 6 million tons in 2025. It is actually a worrying phenomenon as glycerol could potentially emerge as an excessive product with little value. Glycerol, an alcohol and oxygenated chemical from biodiesel production, has essentially enormous potential to be converted into higher value-added chemicals. Using glycerol as a starting material for value-added chemical production will create a new demand on the glycerol market such as lactic acid, propylene glycol, alkyl lactatehydrogen, olefins and others. This paper briefly reviews the recent development on value-added chemicals derived from glycerol through catalytic conversion of refined and crude glycerol that have been proven to be promising in research stage with commercialization potential, or have been put in a corporate marketable production. Despite of the huge potential of products that can be transformed from glycerol, there are still numerous challenges to be addressed and discussed that include catalyst design and robustness; focus on crude or refined glycerol; reactor technology, reaction mechanism and thermodynamic analysis; and overall process commercial viability. The discussion will hopefully provide new insights on justified direction to focus on for glycerol transformation technology. Copyright © 2021 by Authors, Published by BCREC Group. This is an open access article under the CC BY-SA License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0).

Sustainable Synthesis of Drop-In Chemicals from Biomass via Chemical Catalysis: Scopes, Challenges, and the Way Forward

“…GLY can be converted into a host of industrial chemicals using a suitable combination of catalysts and reagents. 92 However, this review discusses the production of only primary petrochemicals from GLY, which then can be converted into the same industrial chemicals following established synthetic routes. GLY is a lucrative feedstock for propylene because the C3 feedstock does not require any C−C bond-making or bond-cleaving steps.…”