Techno-economic assessment of supercritical processes for biofuel production

There is a number of processes involving supercritical fluids (SCF) whereby different biofuels can be produced. On many occasions, supercritical processes can also produce heat and electricity along with biofuels. However, large-scale implementation of supercritical processes mainly depends on the economic competitiveness of biofuels production compared with those fuels produced from conventional fossil sources. Since the technology to produce biofuels based on SCF has not yet been commercialized, the techno-economic assessment (TEA) is a valuable tool to make a decision about a future commercial development, since it allows assessing the potential economic feasibility and the possible technical alternatives to improve the process. This short review provides a techno-economic procedure to apply to any production process biofuel under supercritical conditions and includes a discussion on several supercritical processes where a few economic indicators are used in the analysis of the process feasibility. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.