Souring prices of petroleum, concern over secured supply beside climate change are major drivers in the search for alternative renewable energy sources. The use of biomass to produce energy is an alternative source of renewable energy that can be utilized to reduce the adverse impact of energy production on the global environment.

Current biomass resources comprise primarily industrial waste materials such as sawdust or pulp process wastes, hog fuel, forest residues, clean wood waste from landfills, and agricultural prunings and residues from plants such as ligno — cellulosic materials. The increased use of biomass fuels would diversify the nation’s fuel supply while reducing net CO2 production (because CO2 is with­drawn from the atmosphere during plant growth) and reduce the amount of waste material that eventually ends up in landfills. It is important that biomass uses have a high process efficiency to increase the overall resource productivity from past commercial applications. Biomass is considered carbon neutral because the amount of carbon it can release is equivalent to the amount it absorbed during its lifetime. There is no net increase of carbon to the environment in the long term when combusting the lignocellulosic materials. Therefore, biomass is expected to have a significant contribution to the world energy and environment demand in the foreseeable future.

This new book entitled ‘‘Biomass Conversion: The Interface of Biotechnology, Chemistry and Materials Science’’ assembles 14 chapters authored by renowned specialists. This book provides an important review of the main issues and tech­nologies that are essential to the future success of the production of biofuels, bioenergy, and fine-chemicals from biomass, and the editors and authors are to be applauded for constructing this high quality collection. The scientific and engi­neering breakthroughs contained in this book are the essential building blocks that construct the foundation and future development of biomass conversion with interface of biotechnology, bioengineering, chemistry, and materials science.

This book therefore reviews the state of the art of biomass conversion, along with their advantages and drawbacks. By disseminating this information more widely, this book can help bring about a surge in investment in the use of these technologies and thus enable developing countries to exploit their biomass resources better and help close the gap between their energy needs and their energy supply.

I am delighted that the editors, Dr. Baskar, Dr. Shikha, and Dr. Dhillon, took their strong involvement in this enterprise, and the authors, whose liberally con­tributed expertise made it possible and will guarantee success.

March 2012 Prof. D. S. Chauhan

Vice Chancellor Uttarakhand Technical University Dehradun, Uttarakhand India