One major hindrance to biomass deployment, and one which only benefitted from an unbalanced development, is refining into the different fractions which have a market value. Indeed, most products obtained from oil refining owe to the level of sophistication and optimisation reached by energy-integrated fractioning (mostly, distillation) networks. The separation stage of microalgal and lignocellulosic biomass could be addressed by using a converging approach employing a multipurpose solvent which

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... may be adapted by one single and simple operation to different extractions. Such a single-solvent separation approach would lend itself to scaleup to a solvent-integrated fractionation network that might help mimicking the success story of the oil refining industry.