The ZEOBIOCHEM project responds to one of today’s most pressing global challenges: climate change and the urgent need to transition from fossil fuels to sustainable, low-carbon alternatives. Modern society still relies heavily on petroleum to produce fuels and everyday chemicals. This dependence contributes significantly to greenhouse gas emissions and environmental degradation. To reach the European Union’s ambition of climate neutrality by 2050, new catalytic materials and methods must be developed to transform renewable resources, such as agricultural residues, forestry by-products and other types of non-food biomass, into valuable materials and clean energy.
Replacing fossil-based chemical production with renewable, bio-based processes will help reduce Europe’s carbon footprint, strengthen energy security and create new sustainable industries. In particular, biorefineries, processes that convert biomass into fuels, solvents and other useful chemicals, are key enablers of a circular bio-economy. However, many of today’s biorefinery technologies are still inefficient, costly or environmentally demanding. Developing greener and more efficient catalytic materials for these processes is essential to make bio-based production commercially viable and environmentally sound.
This ZEOBIOCHEM RISE project brings together universities and companies from Europe and Asia to create a new generation of catalysts based on zeolites, that is, microporous materials widely used in the petrochemical industry. The project aimed to design and produce advanced, hierarchical zeolites specially tailored for transforming biomass-derived feedstocks into high-value fuels and chemicals.
The project focused on:
1. Developing innovative zeolite materials with controlled structure and chemical functionality to improve reaction efficiency and selectivity;
2. Applying these catalysts to key biorefinery processes, such as upgrading bio-oils, producing green solvents like ethyl lactate, and converting plant-based sugars into renewable chemical building blocks;
3. Evaluating the environmental and economic benefits of these new methods through life-cycle assessment (LCA) and techno-economic analysis (TEA);
4. Fostering international collaboration, researcher training and knowledge exchange between Europe, China, Japan and Thailand.
This ZEOBIOCHEM RISE project assembles an international multidisciplinary consortium with complementary expertise in zeolite chemistry, heterogeneous catalysis, catalytic reaction engineering, biomass conversion and life cycle assessment (LCA), and aims at developing novel functionalised hierarchical zeolites (including the new methods for making them) and highly efficient catalysis for application in biorefineries.
