Biodiesel facilities: What can we address to make biorefineries commercially competitive?

The biorefinery approach proposes a model for the profitable exploitation of most or all of the industrial facility in an integrated manner. This strategy is ideal for converting biomass into a variety of food, chemical, pharmaceutical, and energy products. This last, in turn, represents the main step towards the production of alternative fuels, such as biodiesel, which still has a high production cost and, therefore, prevents market concurrence against the resilient fossil fuels. In this sense, the objective of this review is to critically address the issues related to biodiesel facilities to make them commercially competitive. The consolidated biorefineries (soybean, palm, rapeseed, and sunflower) and the emergent biorefineries (jatropha, microalgae, yeast, and activated sludge) were presented and discussed with the focus in the multiproduct refining. Based on the data analysis and interpretation compiled in this review, biorefineries are not economically viable against the robustness of the main competitor, the oil refineries. In terms of availability of feedstocks, consolidated biorefineries depend on public policy action, while the emerging ones depend on research and development. Environmental aspects of the biodiesel technologies, although they think ahead about the use of bioresources, they are slightly promising, but not enough in the majority to be a defining criterion.