An application of the Life Cycle Thinking: Green refinery enhancements

•Life Cycle Thinking (LCT) approach for supporting business.•Second generation HVO advanced from microbial oil, feedstocks not in competition with the food sector.•The Well to Wheels (WTW) assessment of the process is 25.22 gCO2/MJ, below the limits imposed by European standards.•“Biomass to Fuel” (BTF) process results environmentally sustainable. The present work describes an example Life Cycle Thinking (LCT), focused on environmental aspects of LCT. More in details, for biofuels, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is compulsory for certification of industrial sites since their sustainability must be in line with the Renewable Energy Directive (RED) requirements. Eni’s Green Refinery is an example of the application of LCT. The paper describes a process, at R&D level, for biofuel production from lignocellulosic biomass deriving from crops not in conflict with the food sector. In particular, the process allows to obtain sugars from these lignocellulosic biomasses (saccharification section) and, once recovered, these sugars are used by oleaginous microrganisms (yeasts) in fermentations (fermentation section) for their growth. The lipids contained in yeast cells are recovered to produce a microbial oil that could be processed in an Ecofining™ plant, producing HVO (Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil). The environmental impact of advanced HVO has been compared with other biofuels pathways and with RED to prove its environmental sustainability.