GREENSYNGAS

Advanced Cleaning Devices for Production of Green Syngas

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 Obiettivo del progetto (Objective)

'The transport sector represents a growing share of the total fossil fuel usage in the world. In order to fulfil the commitment to the Kyoto Protocol, the world usage of fossil oil in transport sectors must be reduced. One important approach to achieving this goal is to increase the share of renewable sources such as feedstocks in conversion routes. These biomass conversion routes involve a number of difficulties that should be attended to first by a suitable process configuration to avoid catalyst poisoning in production of syngas. Second, a major problem in the production of syngas-derived fuel from renewable sources is the presence of contaminates in the product gas from biomass gasifiers. These impurities that cause catalytic poisoning should be completely removed prior to the entry in catalytic systems that utilize in upgrading steps. With the evolution of these advanced uses of biomass derived syngas, it becomes necessary to develop progressively more stringent gas cleaning systems. Therefore, the project's key goal is development of a novel gas cleanup in order to reduce impurities from the gasifier’s product gas to limits required for upgrading to syngas using as a feedstock in production of vehicle fuels. To accomplish this target that biomass conversion should preserve high energy efficiency in the subsequent synthesis steps and prevent catalytic poisoning, an alternative product route and more efficient gas cleaning systems are required. Nevertheless, biomass conversion processes offer many economical and environmental benefits, but it is clear that conversion technology should be able to compete with other conversion routes, for example via methane. Therefore, this RTD programme combines European expertise in the field of gasification, different proficiencies in cleaning technologies, high ranking catalyst expertise, catalyst company, and two research companies with R&D activities in the fields to expedite the development and commercialization of research outcomes.'

Introduzione (Teaser)

In the quest to fulfil commitments to the Kyoto Protocol, biomass feedstocks have been found to represent a viable alternative to fossil fuel sources. To build on their potential, scientists set out to devise technologies for the removal of impurities and contaminants during processing.

Descrizione progetto (Article)

As part of the EU-funded 'Advanced cleaning devices for production of green syngas' (GREENSYNGAS) project, researchers made substantial progress towards this goal. For example, one of the project partners managed to develop novel filtering systems to remove particles from biomass-derived synthesis gas (syngas). The idea was to create syngas pure enough for conversion into biofuels for the transport sector and electricity generation, among other uses.

Three techniques were developed. The first used physical removal of tars and another utilised catalytic reforming of the tar contaminants. A third system employed oxidative thermal treatment.

These promising prototypes fulfilled the aim of the project: to develop and demonstrate advanced syngas cleaning technologies using both chemical and physical methods.

The research drew on the expertise of those in the fields of gasification, cleaning technologies, catalysts, and product development and commercialisation. Project efforts resulted in a number of journal publications and results have been presented at 20 international conferences.

Further research will determine if this system and others investigated in the laboratory can be up-scaled for real-world applications. Biomass conversion processes offer many environmental and economic benefits. GREENSYNGAS has added a very necessary building block to this area of research and it is hoped that further studies could even result in commercialisation.