Project description
Greener competitive biofuels
Governments worldwide are under pressure to combat climate change and its impact. Their goal is to hinder the damaging effects of climate change. Biofuels are part of this effort. They are being promoted as a low-carbon alternative to fossil fuels since they can help reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Unfortunately, current options require emission-heavy and environmentally harmful production processes that make them less optimal to meet present needs. The EU-funded BioRen project aims to introduce a novel, high-value additive for fuel, glycerol tertiary butyl ether. It would increase engine performance while also heavily reducing emissions. The project would develop a novel, cleaner way to turn isobutanol into isobutene.
Objective
The objective of BioRen is to develop techno-economical competitive drop-in biofuels for road transport from the organic fraction of municipal solid waste (OFMSW). A higher value fuel is targeted: glycerol tertiary butyl ether (GTBE) is a promising fuel additive to both diesel and gasoline that improves engine performance and cuts harmful exhaust emissions (i.e. fine dust). It can be blended in higher amounts than e.g. ethanol, without having to change the engine. Bio-ethanol and bio-isobutanol from OFMSW are required intermediaries in this innovation path towards GTBE. Their specific business case as second generation drop-in fuel will be compared to the bio-GTBE business case, to select the most sustainable option for building a demo plant. The project will develop a pretreatment method, industrial 2G Saccharomyces strains that produce ethanol and isobutanol respectively and chemical dehydration to convert isobutanol into isobutene. The isobutene is converted into GTBE by adding Category 1 glycerol, another problematic waste stream. The resulting fuels (ethanol, isobutanol and GTBE) will be tested in engine tests to provide feedback regarding their performance, emission results and fuel use. This ambitious project is continuously monitored by LCA, techno-economic, market and regulatory and IP analysis in order to come up with a realistic business plan. The developed processes will be integrated in a revolutionary MSW treatment plant that combines the most efficient technologies of material reuse, and is currently looking into optimising the profitability of its organic waste fraction. The project consortium has all the required players to succeed: 3 RTO’s address the research challenges, 7 SMEs either bring in their technological developments or are a scale-up partner that bring the processes to min. TRL5. The project is led by a financial consultancy that invests in the MSW demonstration treatment plant.
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.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringenergy and fuelsliquid fuels
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesbiochemistrybiomoleculeslipids
- natural scienceschemical sciencesorganic chemistryalcohols
- social sciencessocial geographytransport
- engineering and technologyindustrial biotechnologybiomaterialsbiofuels
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Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
RIA - Research and Innovation actionCoordinator
9032 Wondelgem
Belgium
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.