Abstract
Byline: Xing Tang, Xianhai Zeng, Zheng Li, Lei Hu, Yong Sun, Shijie Liu, Tingzhou Lei, Lu Lin Recently, valorization of lignocellulosic biomass, the most abundantly available biomass raw material on the Earth, to biofuels and chemicals has attracted great attention worldwide for the purpose of reducing our overwhelming reliance on the non-renewable petroleum resources. [gamma]-Valerolactone (GVL) has recently been hailed as a versatile building block which can be derived from renewable lignocellulosic biomass resource for energy, chemical and material sectors. In this review, focus was principally put on the applications of GVL as a renewable carbon source for green solvents and transportation fuels. In addition, advances in the GVL production through selective reduction of commercial or biomass-derived levulinic acid (LA) and its esters using various hydrogen sources, mainly including molecule H.sub.2, formic acid (FA) and alcohols, have been carefully summarized. Moreover, assessment of the relative merits of different hydrogen sources for the GVL production has also been performed. Author Affiliation: (a) College of Energy, Xiamen University, Xiamen 361005, China (b) Jiangsu Key Laboratory for Biomass-based Energy and Enzyme Technology, Huaiyin Normal University, Huaian 223300, China (c) College of Environmental Science and Forestry, State University of New York, 1 Forestry Drive, Syracuse, NY 13210, USA (d) Henan Academy of Sciences, Zhengzhou, China Article History: Received 20 April 2014; Revised 20 July 2014; Accepted 30 July 2014