Biofuels and Biopolymers

Bioenergy, Biomass and Bioinformatics

Bioenergy is renewable energy made accessible from materials acquired from biological origin. Biomass is any organic matter which has deposited sunlight in the form of chemical energy. As a fuel it may comprise wood, straw, wood waste, sugarcane, manure, and many other by-products from different agricultural processes. In its most exclusive sense it is a synonym to biofuel, which is fuel obtained from biological sources. In its wider sense it includes biomass, the biological matter utilized as a biofuel, as well as the social, scientific, economic and technical fields related with utilizing biological sources for energy. This is a common misbelief, as bioenergy is the energy cultivated from the biomass, as the biomass is the fuel and the bioenergy is the energy stored in the fuel.

Biomass is organic matter extracted from living, or recently living organisms. Biomass can be utilized as a source of energy and it most often directs to plants or plant-based matter which are not used for food or feed, and are precisely called lignocellulosic biomass. As an energy source, biomass can either be used directly via combustion to produce heat, or secondarily after transforming it to numerous forms of biofuel. Conversion of biomass to biofuel can be attained by various methods which are mainly categorized into: thermal, chemical, and biochemical methods. Biomass is a renewable source of fuel to yield energy since waste residues will always prevail – in