Market challenges
Biobased chemistry replaces oil and gas with biomass to produce all the molecules used by industry (plastics, textiles, fuels, etc.). This industrial shift is key to the transition to a world free of fossil resources dependency.
Although many biobased products are already available for mass consumption (biofuels, bioplastics, platform molecules, etc.), there are still many challenges to be met to move away from oil:
- The limited availability of biomass and its competition with food crops,
- The complexity of processing plant-based materials and its impact on production costs,
- The cost of plant-based materials,
The functionalities of plant materials, compared with petroleum.
Faced with this foreseeable tension over the supply of plant-based raw materials, access to a new biomass that does not use arable land for its production, and which offers an immense diversity of functionalities, can contribute to the transition of this industry. Large scale industrial production of microalgae biomass is a response to some of the challenges of biobased chemistry.
