Sustainable economic and industrial growth requires safe, sustainable resources of energy. For the future
re-arrangement of a sustainable economy to biological raw materials, completely new approaches in
research and development, production, and economy are necessary. The ‘first-generation’ biofuels
appear unsustainable because of the potential stress that their production places on food commodities.
For organic chemicals and materials these needs to follow a biorefinery model under environmentally
sustainable conditions. Where these operate at present, their product range is largely limited to simple
materials (i.e. cellulose, ethanol, and biofuels). Second generation biorefineries need to build on the need
for sustainable chemical products through modern and proven green chemical technologies such as
bioprocessing including pyrolysis, Fisher Tropsch, and other catalytic processes in order to make more
complex molecules and materials on which a future sustainable society will be based. This review focus
on cost effective technologies and the processes to convert biomass into useful liquid biofuels and
bioproducts, with particular focus on some biorefinery concepts based on different feedstocks aiming at
the integral utilization of these feedstocks for the production of value added chemicals.