LAUSR

Abstract Biorefineries must be resilient to face socio-economic changes. However, during the conceptual design of biorefineries, the economic assessment usually involves non-accuracy data to estimate capital costs. Thus, capital estimates are so far from the real economic value of a biorefinery project. Furthermore, more efforts should be made to assess and increase biorefinery resilience and scope since most economic assessments are limited to fixed economic conditions. Therefore, this review gives an overview of the most used indicators to accomplish an economic assessment and a summary of different ways to perform a sensitivity analysis, including a case study for coffee cut stems biorefinery. Special focus is done on estimating capital costs to improve the accuracy of economic estimates at the conceptual design level. Then, a new methodology for capital costs estimations is proposed combining industry expertise and detailed engineering concepts.