Biomass resources include wood and wood wastes, agricultural crops and their waste byproducts, municipal solid waste, animal wastes, waste from food processing, and aquatic plants and algae, which are widely used to meet a variety of needs. Due to the fact that biomass is green and renewable, from a wide variety of sources and low in cost, the use of biomass has always been a hot research topic especially in the areas of energy and catalysis. However, highly efficient utilizations of biomass and the industrialization of these utilizations for the production of energy and catalysis applications are still huge challenges. Research urgently needs to discover a facile way of taking full advantage of various biomasses, while best using the differing features and properties available from different biomass sources.

Current studies on possible utilizations of biomass mainly consider the basic ingredients (such as lignin, hemicellulose, and cellulose), the characteristics of pore structures, and the bionic functions. For example, wood, mushrooms, and straw are used to create biomass for quick and effective solar thermal conversion due to the abundant nutrition transport channels which exist in these resources. In order to discover possible utilizations of biomass that are highly efficient and scalable for industrial processes, it is important to consider the underlying chemistry of reactions utilizing biomass as a raw material for energy and catalysis and synthesis pathways in creating different types of biomass from natural resources.

This special issue welcomes original research articles exploring the synthesis and chemical reactions of biomass with applications in catalysis and the production of energy. It will also accept review articles and studies considering and comparing different biomass sources on the resulting properties including efficiency, reduction in environmental waste products, and potential applications.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Chemical pathways of reactions using biomass to create energy and studies on the differences between different biomass sources
• Photocatalytic reformation of biomass into more efficient products for energy and catalysis
• Biomass-derived compounds used for catalysis and the applications of this in chemical industrial applications
• Catalysis in thermal biomass conversions for the production of energy
• The chemical synthesis of new biomimetic and biomass template materials
• Environmental impact studies on the products of different types of energy-creating reactions utilizing biomass and comparisons between biomass and traditional energy sources