Objective
The overall goal is to develop a new process for large-scale production of charcoal for use as sustainable fuel in coal-fired power plants. To comply with power sector quality standards and price levels charcoal production costs will need to be reduced drastically. This will be achieved by developing an innovative process design, with optimised extent of carbonisation, higher conversion yields (30% increase), and significant economies of scale (scale-up factor 10). Specific aim is to reduce production costs by 30%, from 200 to 140 EUR per tonne. Main project activities include: 1) determining charcoal specifications; 2) lab and pilot scale carbonisation experiments, including process modelling & conceptual design; 3) research on feedstock drying & charcoal densification; 4) full-scale co-firing experiments; and 5) engineering of a large-scale carbonisation retort and plant. The 4 SME project partners jointly represent the complete charcoal production and supply chain, whereas the 3 RTD Performers are experts in selected bioenergy fields. Power company Electrabel completes the partnership. If the targeted price level is achieved a large market emerges for the SME Partners.
Kyoto targets (minus 6% greenhouse gas emissions in 2008-2012) and the EU renewable electricity directive (22% renewable by 2010) force energy companies to look for low-carbon technologies and fuels. Co-firing biomass is an efficient and cost-effective method to comply with these objectives, but the use of raw biomass is technically complicated and not always viable. Using wood charcoal as co-firing fuel can overcome these hurdles. Interest of the energy sector in the concept is demonstrated by the participation of end user Electrabel who will perform a full-scale experiment (500 t of charcoal) in its CG-13 coal plant. Electrabel aims to co-fire 240,000 tonnes of biomass (charcoal) per annum by 2008. Other power producers have adopted similar targets.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
- engineering and technologyelectrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineeringelectrical engineeringelectric energy
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringenergy and fuelsfossil energycoal
- engineering and technologyelectrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineeringelectrical engineeringpower engineeringelectric power generationcombined heat and power
- agricultural sciencesagricultural biotechnologybiomass
- natural sciencesmathematicsapplied mathematicsmathematical model
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Call for proposal
FP6-2003-SME-1
See other projects for this call
Funding Scheme
COOPERATIVE -Coordinator
217 ENSCHEDE
Netherlands