Prospective Life Cycle Assessment and upscaling of an emerging biorefinery process: A case study on methyl ketone

The scientific community is increasingly interested in emerging technologies in biorefinery context that utilize agricultural residues as a means of transitioning from a fossil-based economy to a more sustainable economy. Often, these technologies are assessed for their environmental competitiveness while still at laboratory or pilot scale through Prospective Life Cycle Assessment (PLCA). PLCA of emerging technologies is performed by upscaling laboratory scale data to an industrial scale and exploring possible future scenarios for the technology. However, PLCAs are often subjected to a high level of uncertainty and pose significant challenges. These are data scarcity, lack of knowledge on upscaling techniques, rigorous background modelling approaches, and comparability. This work performs advanced process calculations based on literature from the fields of process engineering, plant design, and expert input for upscaling laboratory scale data and implementing it on a case study of methyl ketones (MKs) production, to highlight the effectiveness and robustness of this upscaling approach. The PLCA results offer important insights into the environmental hotspots of the process that are crucial for technology developers to ensure process sustainability. Potential challenges and benefits associated with the upscaling approach and PLCA are highlighted in the work and finally, a comparison of the environmental performance of the process at different scale signifies the importance of upscaling when assessing the environmental performance of the emerging technologies. • Upscaling and Prospective Life Cycle Assessment of an emerging biorefinery process. • Advanced process calculations for upscaling and simplified background modeling for PLCA provide good results and easy to implement for many LCA practitioner. • Lack of knowledge on process engineering, optimization techniques, process selection, and uncertainty are identified as key challenges. • KOH demand in the fermentation stage is the environmental hotspot of the process. • A comparison between the environmental footprints at different scales signifies the importance of upscaling in emerging processes.