The development of a screening tool to identify new products for the South African sugarcane industry

摘要

The production of new revenue streams within the sugarcane industry would represent an opportunity to enhance economic stability and sustainability of the industry. However, identifying the most commercially feasible new product option from the numerous possibilities available is a challenge. The Sugar Milling Research Institute NPC developed the New Products Greenhouse (NPG) toolbox as a screening tool for generating a first-pass assessment of the commercial feasibility of new products. The NPG screening approach considers key aspects pertaining to the successful implementation of a bio-based product in a South African sugarcane biorefinery and integrates feedstock competition, market, technology and economic criteria into the assessment. A standardised predefined set of criteria and a scoring scale are used to assign risk scores based on data gathered for a product candidate. Once a product is assessed, the NPG toolbox uses built-in algorithms to calculate an economic potential index (termed economic constraint), a business risk and a technology risk score. These outputs can be used to rank new product candidates according to their commercial potential. The toolbox excludes consideration of capital and operating costs and therefore the results should not be interpreted as a recommendation to invest in a particular product but rather that there may be merit in under-taking further technoeconomic analysis on that product. The toolbox also includes a system to store information gathered for products of sugarcane in a structured manner. The NPG project team intends to further refine the toolbox and validation of the NPG approach will be performed to strengthen the credibility of the outputs/This paper describes the development of the NPG toolbox and demonstrates its ability to enable quick and crude assessments to reveal where opportunities lie in the field of bio-based products. It is anticipated that this toolbox will facilitate the identification of promising commercially feasible products, providing a rational basis for the selection of sugarcane-derived products for detailed technoeconomic research studies.