Biorefineries are essential to the development of a sustainable, bio-based economy. These facilities transform different types of biomass – such as crop and crop residues, roadside grass, reeds and even nut shells – into valuable building blocks for products such as construction and packaging materials, coatings, bioplastics and biofuels. While biorefineries have the potential to replace fossil fuel refineries, they are often not yet competitive, partly due to high processing costs.

Significant findings

During his PhD research and in the years leading up to it, Smit, together with a team at TNO, made significant progress to increase the competitiveness and sustainability of biorefineries. By refining the Organosolv separation process, they discovered a cost-effective way to isolate the high-quality green building blocks – such as cellulose, sugars and lignin – from biomass.

Another key finding was the flexibility of the process to extract these compounds from a wide variety of biomass residues, further improving the feasibility and sustainability of biorefineries. “We can now convert eighty to ninety-five percent of biomass into high-quality green building blocks,” explains Smit. “The new process performs exceptionally well in terms of product yield, cost-effectiveness and durability – something the researchers have never achieved before.”