Chemical Building Blocks from Biomass

Claudia Deutsch writes in the NY Times (28.2.2006) how the chemical industry looks for alternatives of crude oil as a basis for their products. They look for processes using biomass like wood, straw or crops as a feedstock for producing principle chemical compounds. Actually, it's a challenging vision because the chemical industry has optimized processes in refineries for many decades. Substituting these processes today is not economical, and some companies even don't put research money into a field that may have no alternative in the coming decades.