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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ADD-ON (A demonstration plant of enhanced biogas production with Add-On technology)

Teaser

Summary

The overall goal of the project is to commercialize Ductorâ€™s proprietary nitrogen-control technology, which has the potential to revolutionize the economics of biogas production. Our technology, based on cumulative R&D investments worth over â‚¬4 million, is capable of removing over 60% of the nitrogen from several organic waste materials before biogasification. As a result, wider utilization of high-nitrogen organic waste such as chicken manure in biogas production becomes possible, which will allow millions of tons of unexploited organic waste in Europe to be processed cleanly, economically, and efficiently.

With Ductorâ€™s technology, biogas producers can replace maize silage with chicken manure as biogas feedstock, for example. With this approach alone, European biogas producers could achieve a combined â‚¬1 billion improvement in their profitability while simultaneously cutting CO2 emissions by 1.5 million tons and releasing more than 811,000 hectares of cultivated land for socially and environmentally sustainable use, such as food production.

This project focuses on scaling up the current pilot equipment intoto industrial scale (over 1000 m3 of biogas production reactor), optimization of the process, and convincing reference customers to enable broader market penetration.

Work performed

During the first reporting period, we signed delivery agreements for an industrial-scale Add-On product with three customers, one of which will be pilot customer for the ADD-ON project. We also met with potential equipment suppliers and potential off-takers for ammonium sulphate and improved our understanding of the economics of German biogas producers.

With Ductorâ€™s Finnish bench scale pilot plant we were able to demonstrate that long term, over six months, operation of a biogas plant using only de-ammonified (i.e. removing organic ammonia by the Ductor process) chicken litter is possible. And there is very little biogas potential lost when the gases formed in the Ductor fermentation are fed into the biogas reactor.

In laboratory scale the potential of feathers as a feedstock for biogas was demonstrated (Deliverable 3.1). The feathers yielded high biogas potential, but were not taken into the Finnish pilot in order not to disturb the long operation with chicken litter.

We have also conducted market research to i) verify the market potential within the German biogas market, our 1st phase target market and ii) identify other interesting markets for our technology, both in Europe and other regions such as the US.

Final results

The progress of the project to date increases our confidence on achieving the expected large environmental, social and economical benefits that Ductorâ€™s technology can enable. We expect our technology to be a game-changer for biogas industry and enable wider utilization of biogas. Importantly, the market potential for our technology is global. This is because there are billions of tons of underutilized high-nitrogen waste material (such as chicken manure) in the world. Assuming we are able to capture 20% of chicken manure produced in the world under Ductor\'s technology, there would be potential for over 38,000 new biogas plants (500kW electricity production capacity).