Techno-Economic Assessment of an Olive Mill Wastewater (OMWW) Biorefinery in the Context of Circular Bioeconomy

Abstract

The concept of biorefinery constitutes a significant contributing factor to the emerging transition toward a sustainable bioeconomy. In such a context, replacing oil and petrochemicals by biomass may involve several feedstocks, platforms, processes, technologies, as well as final products. This paper concentrates on the complex process of transferring the concept of biorefinery from laboratory to industry, and sheds light on the techno-economic and complexity management dimensions involved in this endeavor. Toward this end, adopting a systems perspective, the paper presents a structured and comprehensive framework, comprising the definition of the transformation process, business model development, techno-economic assessment, as well as strategic positioning and viability assessment, which may be employed to facilitate the engineering at large and launch a biorefining venture in a circular bioeconomy context. The framework is applied in the context of a biorefinery plant in a specific region in southern Greece, which is based on the valorization of olive mill wastewater (a ‘strong’ and quite common industrial waste in the Mediterranean basin), and produces biopolymers (PHAs) and bioenergy (H2).