Tutorial sessions at BBEST 2017

 All tutorials will take place on Monday, October 16th, 2017 From 14:00 to 17:00h

Tutorial 1

Entrepreneurship – Creation, sustainable innovation and business plan

(Organizer: Prof. Dr. Flavia Vischi Winck – IQ-USP)

Description: The Brazilian bioenergy sector faces many challenges, including how innovation generated by scientific researchers can be transferred to the market and translated into novel applications. Several possibilities to overcome such challenges have been proposed and different paths to the development of successful applications are possible. However, in many cases, the long-term success of the startups depends on a proper business plan and a business model that includes several aspects that could increase the chances of successful insertion of novel technologies into the market and that will fit society interests. The discussion about topics related to recent trends on business models and last tendencies of innovation startups are very much needed, especially in times of possible economical constrains.

Tutorial 2

Sustainability – Water-Bioenergy-Land Use Nexus: challenges and opportunities for sustainability

(Organizer: Dr. Carla Kazue Nakao Cavaliero – FEM-UNICAMP)

Description: The economic development, populational growth and urbanization process will increase water and energy world demand. In the environmental aspect, climate changes and the extreme climate events have affected water availability and, as consequence, energy production. On the other hand, the necessity of energy to provide water services to all sectors and to the population indicates that impacts on this sector will influence water supply.

In bioenergy sector, water-energy nexus is discussed considering also land use component. It is possible to find in the literature debates of issues around the role of the sector on feedstock depletion, water depletion and pollution. In this context, many researchers believe that the ecosystem services approach could help to establish synergies between environmental and social issues and a Global-BioPact project advanced in the definition of several indicators to monitor the impacts of bioenergy production on ecosystem services.

The effects on water resources (availability and quality), considering land use and bioenergy production, depend on where bioenergy infrastructure is located and how it is managed. Water's quality deterioration or its improvement can be observed also along all supply chain, from production to transformation. Authors suggest that with support of institutions for planning and monitoring agricultural development, it is possible to promote the growing of biofuel crops without damaging ecosystems services. This shows that the critical challenge is the complexity of developing integrated land management frameworks that can reconcile bioenergy production, and food production, with ecosystem service delivery, such as water supply.

Facing all challenges, strategies focused only in a part of water-bioenergy-land use nexus, without considering the interconnections between them, can result in undesirable consequences. Besides public policies for a better resource management, opportunities on research and development of more efficient technologies are expected. Innovation is necessary and that means thinking differently about how to supply water and energy demands.

This tutorial will present and discuss issues related to water-bioenergy-land use nexus in the context of socio-economic and environmental sustainability, focusing on the following topics:

• sustainability concept and socio-economic and environmental indicators;

• concept of water-bioenergy-land use nexus;

• impacts and risks related to water-bioenergy-land use nexus;

• challenges and opportunities to water-bioenergy-land use nexus: research and development of more efficient technologies (e.g. less intensive in water demand) and introduction of integrated public policies.

Tutorial 3

Sugarcane and/or Energy Cane

(Organizers: Dr. Hermann Paulo Hoffmann and Dr. Monalisa Sampaio Carneiro – RIDESA)

Description: In Brazil, electrical energy is the most widely-used form of energy. It can be obtained from different ways where the main source comes from hydropower plants. Over the last years, there has been an increase in the demand for electricity coupled with the water supply crisis in the country. This scenario leads to a substantial increase in the energy price accelerating the demand for new alternative sources. In parallel, the sugar and ethanol sector already presented and used an alternative form of energy to supply their internal demand, derived from sugarcane bagasse, used as biomass. On this occasion, the sector applied a wide range of investments in new technologies aiming at increasing energy efficiency for the generation of surplus and, therefore, commercialization. There was then a shift in the paradigm that instituted energy cogeneration as a source of extra income for sugarcane mills; at this moment, the sector became known as the sugar and energy sector. Given this promising scenario, breeding programs adopted new patterns in the development of varieties, which resulted in the development of the energy cane, with high fiber content. Considering the great interest and demand for this raw material, coming from sugarcane, some questions can be asked: what will be the varietal profile of a sugarcane for the future? What will be the demand for the future: sugar cane versus energy cane, energy cane rusticity versus poor soils; what are the challenges to establish a varietal profile when using the raw material for the production of 2G ethanol, biomass direct combustion, and cogeneration in conventional mills? What will be the nutritional demand (fertilization) of sugarcane and its implications on the production costs? What are the phytosanitary challenges for this new type of sugarcane that presents a different genealogy? In this tutorial the focuses will be to understand the needs of the sugar and energy sector for the future and to discuss the sugarcane profiles that will better suit certain soil types. What will be the sugarcane ideotype in 2050?

Tutorial 4

Industrial Production of Biofuels: Learning through Experience

(Organizer: Dr. Paulo Seleghim Jr. – EESC – USP)

Description: The effective deployment of new biomass to biofuels conversion technologies requires advancements that include crop yield combined with innovative process engineering in order to achieve improved techno-economic performance. It is usual that a new technology gain maturity by proving various aspects of its performance through successive steps at different scales. Smaller-scale, lesscostly, shorter-duration activities are completed first, based on the hypothesis that successful completion at a given scale improves the chances of success of larger-scale facilities that follow, reducing financial and technological risks and facilitating further investments. This process has been observed in the deployment of most of our current wide application technologies such the world wide processes of finding, extracting, refining and transporting petroleum and the corresponding products, or simply the “petroleum industry”, and, more recently, the global system of interconnected computer networks, i.e. “the Internet”.

In the case of the biofuels industry, despite the significant progresses, technological hurdles remain around lignocellulosic biomass deconstruction, product separation energy, biological inhibition, chemical selectivity and monomer purity, in addition to improving integration of the whole conversion process. And, as it happened with the internet and petroleum industry, the biofuels industry will benefit from the experience gained by producers and consumers in several aspects, particularly in terms of its techno-economic performance. More specifically, learning through experience, also called learn by doing, experimental learning or industrial learning, naturally drives improvements through reinforcing feedbacks to technology reevaluation at all levels. Additionally, learning through experience frequently generates improvements to cost and performance metrics as well as in safety and/or environmental compliance as the performance of the whole biofuels production process is continually and repeatedly tested.

Currently, as the first full scale commercial biofuels production plants were commissioned around the world and are in operation for some years, there is a great opportunity to jointly discuss and scrutinize their performance in order to accelerate the maturity gaining process for the benefit of all. And Brazil can play in important role in this process because of its fully deployed and mature 1st generation sugarcane to ethanol industry, as well as because of the experience gained from two pioneering 2nd generation ethanol industrial plants (Raízen and Granbio). Within this context, this tutorial intends to capacitate the attendee to better participate in these discussions by providing the necessary background Tutorial 4 knowledge in terms of process modeling and techno-economic as well as environmental analysis.

Three topics will be covered in this tutorial:

• technology assessment: conversion route for biomass feedstocks to biofuels and bioproducts;

• process modeling and simulation (thermodynamics, thermochemistry, process equipment, etc.);

• simulation and techno-economic (including capital budgeting) and environmental analysis of a biorefinery process to produce fuel, power and biochemicals.