Techno-economic feasibility analysis: The missing piece in the puzzle of deep eutectic solvents

Deep eutectic solvents (DESs) have recently emerged as greener alternatives to conventional solvents and mixtures on account of their intriguing properties. However, despite exponential growth in DES-related research, the majority of publications lack economic feasibility and cost analyses, which in turn limits the large-scale applications of DESs in industry and causes current research trends to deviate from the proper path of sustainable development. Thus, the main objectives of this review are to cover efforts that have considered the techno-economic analysis (TEA) of DESs and to reshape the direction of DES research and return it to a sustainable track. This article highlights the main research gaps that the scientific community needs to fill to accelerate the scalability of DESs in numerous industrial applications geared towards sustainability. It also sheds light on the significance of carrying out TEA studies to evaluate the feasibility of applying these mixtures in different processes. Interestingly, most of the applications that used TEA were related to renewable and sustainable energy generation and storage.