**5. Conclusions**

The growing worldwide use of biodiesel, an alternative renewable fuel, has generated large amounts of crude glycerol, a byproduct in its production, which presents large opportunities for application, after purification. Purified glycerol is a high-value and commercial chemical that may be used in a large number of applications, including its conversion into value-added products. Among them, 1,3-PDO, acrylonitrile and acrylic acid are promising products.

Commercial information about these products can be obtained from open websites of social associations, producing companies and market consulting companies free of charge. The careful analysis of these information shows there is high addedvalue when producing 1,3-PDO, acrylonitrile and acrylic acid from glycerol due to the difference between the prices of the products generated and the raw material.

This work shows that there is great potential for economic feasibility for the development of processes, in an integrated biorefinery, for the industrial production of chemicals from glycerol.

In addition, the effective use of glycerol as raw material for the production of chemicals, conventionally obtained from fossil raw material, may contribute to the reduction of using non-renewable natural resources and to the development of a greener chemistry.

#### **Acknowledgements**

The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the RCGI – Research Centre for Gas Innovation, hosted by the University of São Paulo (USP) and sponsored by FAPESP – São Paulo Research Foundation (2014/50279-4) and Shell Brasil.

This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - Brasil (CAPES – Personnel Coordination of Improvement of Higher Level) - Finance Code 001.

The authors also gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the FAPESB – Bahia Research Foundation and CAPES National Exchange Program in partnership with Universidade Federal da Bahia and Universidade de São Paulo.

### **Conflict of interest**

The authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest to disclose. The funding sources were not involved in the analysis and interpretation of data, neither in the writing of the manuscript, nor in the decision of submission for publication. This decision was based entirely on technical relevance and conjuncture pertinence of the study, based solely on the judgment of the authors.

**199**

Brazil

**Author details**

Rita Maria de Brito Alves2

Alisson Dias da Silva Ruy1,2, Ana Luíza Freitas Ferreira1

\*Address all correspondence to: rmbalves@usp.br

provided the original work is properly cited.

\* and Luiz Antônio Magalhães Pontes1

1 Departamento de Engenharia Química, Universidade Federal da Bahia, Rua Prof. Aristides Novis, no. 02, 2nd floor, Federação, 40210-630, Salvador, Bahia, Brazil

© 2020 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,

2 Departamento de Engenharia Química, Universidade de São Paulo, Escola Politécnica, Av. Prof. Luciano Gualberto, no. 380, Tv. 3, 05508-010, São Paulo, SP,

, Antônio Ésio Bresciani2

,

*Market Prospecting and Assessment of the Economic Potential of Glycerol from Biodiesel*

*DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.93965*

*Market Prospecting and Assessment of the Economic Potential of Glycerol from Biodiesel DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.93965*
