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Context and challenges

Biorefineries are often presented as a major component of the bioeconomy to support the ecological and energy transition in territories. Scientific journals show that biorefinery design is guided primarily by operational research (optimisation) and industrial chemical or bioprocess engineering approaches. Studies generally focus on biorefinery processes, production units or supply chains, and assess technical and economic performance (cost, profit, energy and water consumption, etc.) and environmental indicators that have a global impact also found in LCAs (global warming, eutrophication, acidification, etc.). Simultaneously, there are relatively few operational biorefineries, and their diversity is limited, as a recent study has shown (Ait Sair et al., 2021). Likewise, the production of cellulosic biofuels is off to a slow start despite important technological progress notably in  biocatalysis (Dale, 2018). Research in different fields has linked the slow development of biorefineries to inadequate integration into the bioeconomy of territories, which leads to, for example, a lack of involvement on the part of farmers in the project (Dale, 2018; Gobert, 2018; Wohlfahrt et al, 2019).
The challenge therefore is to do a better job of taking into account a territory’s specificities and issues when assessing a project for a biorefinery.  The scientific challenge is associated with the dearth of studies that focus on this highly interdisciplinary problem and therefore with a lack of methodologies available to carry out this kind of assessment.

Goals

The goal of the EDIFICE project is to develop a method and tools to analyse “What if” scenarios that would help answer the following question:
“If this biomass were treated in this type of biorefinery, how would it affect the territory’s sustainability?”
The project also aims to develop an app for a concrete case study that demonstrates the relevance of the method.
The approach chosen involves looking at market gardening in the peri-urban region of Nantes. Given the complexity of production systems, the EDIFICE project will concentrate on the development of methodology and tools to the detriment of the exhaustiveness of types of market gardening biomass, types of biorefineries and possible recovery routes. As such, the case study will focus specifically on managing tomato and cucumber waste from greenhouses.
EDIFICE will take an integrated and interdisciplinary approach to scenario analysis, combining experiments and modelling as well as steps to bring together players in the production sector and decision makers.

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