The world faces a dilemma:
-- to continue "business as usual", and to bear the consequences of declining petroleum reserves later, or
-- to start investing now in development of technologies for a sustainable future based on renewable energy and bio-derived feedstocks for the chemical industry.
For decades, the chemical industry has been based on fossil materials (petroleum, gas and coal). The industry has developed chemistry for key intermediates which are currently used to construct the existing diversity of functional products making up the $400B+ market. The functionality of key building blocks accessible from the pool of renewable raw materials (i.e. carbohydrates, triglycerides) has been grossly under-investigated and, in many cases, completely neglected. Cheap and abundant petroleum has influenced the minds of the industrial chemists, and the decision makers. This influence has resulted in tremendous gaps and "blind spots" in the knowledge of bio-based chemistry.
Making a plastic table top, a bottle of shampoo, or a cushion for car seat from renewable feedstocks in a cost-effective fashion requires use of different chemistry and intermediates than those needed to make similar products from petroleum. Green chemistry can deliver novel functional products that perform at par with or better than the existing petrochemical goods. Availability of such green products will deliver a high degree of economic sustainability to the global chemical industry and provide major economic and societal protection from the global rise in prices of petroleum and other fossil fuels.
