Project description
Turning pulp mill residues into biofuels
Cellulosic fibres for paper are made from wood via a chemical pulping process. This process extracts cellulose from wood, generating large residue streams such as bark and back liquor. These residue streams can be found on all pulp mills and can be converted into biofuels. The conversion is based on gasification followed by Fischer Tropsch fuel synthesis yielding a high-quality liquid transport fuel at a reasonable cost. The EU-funded Pulp&Fuel project will show how fuels can be produced efficiently without a negative impact on the pulp mill operations. The project studies supercritical water gasification adapted to wet resources and dry gasification adapted to dry resources such as bark. The aim of the project is to achieve high gasification efficiencies.
Objective
The transport sector is dominated by the use of fossil fuels, and alternative fuels represent currently only 5% of fuel consumption in EU. The EU objective for the share of renewable energy in the transport sector is 10% in 2020. To achieve this goal, new advanced biofuels are needed and must be produced from alternative feedstocks. The Pulp&Fuel concept is to develop a simple and robust fuel synthesis process taking advantage of the synergy between super critical water gasification (wet gasification) and fixed bed gasification (dry gasification). For the Pulp&Fuel project, we have chosen to study the integration of the full process on a pulp mill. The developed process will take advantage of low to negative value wet and dry resources on a paper mill to add value to the overall process. The yield of biofuels will be significantly increased to 28 % compared to a classic approach that would only yield 18 %. The Pulp&Fuel final objective is to produce biofuels below 1 €/L without having a negative impact on the existing operations of the pulp mill. To achieve these goals a team of 10 partners, leaders in their field, from 4 EU-member states, will join efforts. To this end, we have defined five ambitious specific objectives: - Improve the efficiency of the dry gasification process from 70 to 80 % - Improve the carbon conversion of the wet gasification process to above 90 % - Improve fuel synthesis to obtain carbon efficiencies above 50 % (state of the art 45%) - Integration of the full process and synergy between dry and wet gasification - Integrated assessments will show that biofuels can be produced below 1 €/L Related work packages, tasks, milestones and risks are considered in order to achieve these objectives. The Pulp&Fuel project addresses the topic “liquid diesel- and gasoline-like biofuels from biogenic residues and wastes through either chemical, biochemical and thermochemical pathways, or a combination of them” of the LC-SC3-RES-21-2018 call.
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Funding Scheme
RIA - Research and Innovation actionCoordinator
75015 PARIS 15
France