Greetings..! 

In the 20th century, researchers and industries were fully engrossed in developing methods or processes to produce chemicals, transportation fuels, and energy using fossil reserves (coal, oil, gas). However, geopolitical scenarios, fluctuating prices, environmental concerns, and policy decisions insisted to look out for alternative reserves to fossil reserves.  In view of this, the following alternatives can be looked into for,

  • Generation of energy: solar, wind, hydrothermal, tidal, nuclear & biomass

  • Production of transportation fuels: water, biomass

  • Synthesis of chemicals: biomass

Looking at the above alternative resources available, biomass is the only flexible resource that can be leveraged to produce energy, fuels, and chemicals in a sustainable manner, and hence, in recent times biomass is gaining a lot of attention.

Biomass can be conventionally defined as, “any living or recently living material.” Biomass, a biological mass isessentially an organic material made up of C, H, O and N elements. Interestingly, humans can also be called as biomass along with other animals and plants as all of us are made up of these 4 basic elements.  However, not to fear currently research surrounding biomass is done mainly using plant-derived biomass. 

Plants/trees/crops during their growth use sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide to make photosynthesis products such as starch, cellulose, hemicelluloses, lignin, proteins, waxes etc. While starch is edible to humans for instance in the form of potato, rice, corn etc. the other products are mainly non-edible to humans. So, naturally, this non-edible part is preferred to be used to produce chemicals, energy, and fuels to avoid food versus chemicals/energy/fuel debate. The lignocellulosic materials made up of cellulose, hemicelluloses and lignins are thus can be used as an alternate reserve. Additionally, environmental concerns demand that newer methods/processes should follow green chemistry principles. In view of this, the development of green routes to efficiently convert lignocellulosic materials into value-added chemicals is of prime importance.

In our group, we are keen to workaround, 

Green and sustainable chemistry, environmentally benign pathways/processes, biomass, lignocelluloses, polysaccharides, cellulose, hemicelluloses, lignin, sugars, sugar derivatives, heterogeneous catalysts, solid acids, supported metal catalysts, catalysis, hydrolysis, dehydration, hydrolytic hydrogenation, hydrodeoxygenation, oxidation, characterizations etc.​

Based on the above keywords, we work in the following areas,

1. Conversion of hemicelluloses into sugars and furfural

2. Depolymerization of lignin into aromatic monomers

3. Synthesis of value-added chemicals from sugars and sugar derivatives

4. Synthesis of materials which can be used as catalysts in the above-mentioned reactions

Besides working on catalytic processes, our group is also interested in understanding the fundamentals of catalysts and reactions (characterizations & optimization of parameters).

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Contact details


 Dr. Paresh L Dhepe

Senior Principal Scientist, CSIR-National Chemical Laboratory, Pune 411008, India.

Professor, Academy of Scientific and Innovative Research (AcSIR), Ghaziabad, New Delhi, India

Room No. 289, Main Building
Catalysis and Inorganic Chemistry Division
CSIR-National Chemical Laboratory
Dr. Homi Bhabha Road, Pashan, Pune 411008, INDIA
Tel. 91-20-25902024, FAX 91-20-25902633
E-mail: pl.dhepe@ncl.res.in