Despite the dwindling of fossil energy sources and their environmental impacts, the participation of these sources represent an important percentage in the global energy matrix and the production of their derived chemicals is continuously growing. Therefore, modern society should develop alternative and renewable energy sources as well as bio-based chemicals. This document provides insights into the potential of lignocellulosic biomass as a suitable and viable alternative to fossil sources. It should be remarked that feasibility, viability and outbreak of renewable sources will not only depend on environmental benefits but also on current regulations and laws since some of them are currently in economic disadvantage. In this regard, pretreatment methods, used to separate the main plant polymers are reviewed, including a discussion on factors contributing to its inefficient conversion. Further, three semi-industrialized methods (steam explosion, ammonia fiber expansion, and reactive extrusion) were compared with a novel pretreatment process: mechanocatalysis. The analysis included economic, environmental, chemical and process safety indicators as well as severity of the different pretreatments. The literature review and later analysis suggested that steam explosion represents the most adequate alternative when the main objective is to preserve the cellulosic fraction of biomass to produce second generation biofuels. In addition, mechanocatalysis is more prone to render high water soluble products that preserve the cellulosic and hemicellulosic fractions of lignocellulosic biomass and a solid lignin-containing fraction in a one-pot process. However these advantages compensate only partially the high energetic barrier imposed by the mechanical technology with a reported energy consumption of approximately 1.16 times the energy content of the substrate in a one kilogram scale, which limits it use for biofuels production. Finally, rice husk pretreatment was studied, the material is a lignocellulosic low cost substrate in Colombia and its potentiality processing was also evaluated and proposed with mechanocatalysis and the other researched methods.