Promoting safety in innovative and sustainable biomass value chains
Résumé
The development of the so-called bio-economy, replacing « black gold » by « green gold » towards industrial ecology as well as the promotion of the circular economy lead to consider wastes and biomass residues of different sources as new and valuable feedstocks. This global context requires a new paradigm in the way we should tackle the issue of material and process safety in advanced biorefineries. This was recently debated in a wokshop organized by DG Research [1] where safety consideration was pointed out as deserving dedicated research in this area. In addition, adequate safety management strategy implemented at early design stage was also perceived as a contributing factor of sustainability and societal acceptance of industry. Based on recently completed or on-going projects like Imidazolium or Evalbioraf (SAS Pivert), HUGS, ALFA-BIRD, ZELCOR, GREENLAND, FLEDGED (EU FP7 & H2020 programmes) or CORABIO (CR Picardy), the presentation will examplify key issues that needs to be considered towards proactive material hazard characterization or process safety in this sector. Final goal of the presentation is ultimately to explain the attendees how to move from conventional risk analysis and simple compliance to existing safety focused regulations towards advanced integration of safety management as a key and measurable sustainability aspect in the context of biorefining. Among material-focused safety issues, the cases of alternative solvents or green solvents like « ionic liquids » (Fig. 1a) [2] or deep eutectic solvents (Fig. 1b) or biofuels will be pointed out to show about ignored or underscored safety issues or on misleading data regarding their fire behaviour at large scale (fuel ethanol). The importance of revisiting self-heating behaviour (see Fig.2) and other safety related issues all along innovative value chains with biobased feedstock [3] will also be outlined with an insight on biobased residues like biomass materials issuing from phytoremediation of polluted soils. The emerging interest on furan derivatives since new biobased routes of productions were shown promising will also been commented in terms of new needs to dig in the relating safety issues. Even more rarely investigated in recent research [4/5], safety aspects mostly addressing the process side (preatreatment, conversion, downprocessing, emission abatement) will be the latter part of the presentation covering key aspects of biorefining as : a) biological conversion processes and « accidental » biological risks, b) upstream and downstream flexibility demand versus safety , c) process intensification and inherently safer design (ISD) potentially antagonistic aspects [6], d) safety issues pertaining to process water, thermal and carbon streams recycling or to process integration, e) hazards pertaining to zero waste and energy self-sufficient targets), f) Corrosive environment problems as compared to classical refineries. This latter issue at frontier of product and process safety will also be debated at light of existing new hazardous property « corrosive to metal » recently introduced in CLP Regulation 1272/2008/EC and findings from the ECORBIO project. Eventually, the interest to link the safety approach and the evaluation of the environmental impacts of biobased processes will be also discussed.