Biobased Fuels & Chemicals

Torrefied biomass is particularly well suited as a starting point for syngas production and further catalytic or enzymatic conversion into high value biobased fuels & chemicals.

In today’s world, the production of many fuels and chemicals is still based on fossil coal, oil and gas. From a technical point of view, almost all industrial materials made from fossil resources could be substituted by their biobased counterparts. However, the majority of organic chemicals and polymers (330 million tons per annum) are still derived from fossil based feedstocks. This is because the cost of biobased production is too high or proven industrial scale production processes do not exist yet. But this is changing, as we can see around the world significant steps are being taken to make this transition happen.

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A key factor in the successful realization of a biobased economy is the development of biorefinery concepts. This allows for highly efficient and cost effective processing of biological feedstocks that can produce a range of biobased fuels & chemicals.

Torrefaction is an enabling technology for using biomass as feedstock for syngas production. Due to its high heating value, homogeneous properties and easy grindability, torrefied biomass is the ideal input for CFB and entrained flow gasifiers. The syngas from the gasification can be used to produce electricity or it can be converted by catalytic processes to produce biobased fuels and chemicals. Among the retrievable products are hydrogen, methanol, ethanol, dimethylether, butanol, hydrogen, ammonia, and Fischer Tropsch diesel. On the basis of these products further chemicals, polymers and plastics can be produced. Alternatively, the syngas itself can be further processed by fermentation into longer chain chemicals such as oleochemicals, polymers and many other products.