Integrated design of renewable fuels and their production processes: recent advances and challenges

Rational design of renewable fuels for advanced internal combustion engines aims at enabling CO2-neutral road transportation with low pollutant emissions. It requires identifying species/mixtures with favorable fuel properties and designing sustainable production processes. We have discussed opportunities and challenges of integrating fuel and production process design in 2012 [9]. The present article reviews the progress made since then. Importantly, the field has moved from single-molecule fuel evaluation and mass-based production pathway screening to multi-species fuel design and energy-based pathway assessment. Integrated methods now simultaneously optimize fuel composition and production pathways. We discuss challenges in incorporating more detailed modeling and give perspectives on well-to-wheel optimization.