for Mobile Facilities

Science (July 11, 2010) — Chemical engineers at Purdue University have developed a new method to process agricultural waste and other biomass into biofuels, and they are proposing the creation of mobile processing plants that would rove the Midwest to produce the fuels.

“What’s important is that you can process all kinds of available biomass– wood chips, switch grass, corn stover, rice husks, wheat straw …,” said Rakesh Agrawal, the Winthrop E. Stone Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering.

The approach sidesteps a fundamental economic hurdle in biofuels: Transporting biomass is expensive because of its bulk volume, whereas liquid fuel from biomass is far more economical to transport, he said.

“Material like corn stover and wood chips has low energy density,” Agrawal said. “It makes more sense to process biomass into liquid fuel with a mobile platform and then take this fuel to a central refinery for further processing before using it in internal combustion engines.”

The new method, called fast-hydropyrolysis-hydrodeoxygenation, works by adding hydrogen into the biomass-processing reactor. The hydrogen for the mobile plants would be derived from natural gas or the biomass itself. However, Agrawal envisions the future use of solar power to produce the hydrogen by splitting water, making the new technology entirely renewable.

The method, which has the shortened moniker of H₂Bioil — pronounced H Two Bio Oil — has been studied extensively through modeling, and experiments are under way at Purdue to validate the concept.

Findings are detailed in a research paper appearing online in June in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. The paper was written by former chemical engineering doctoral student Navneet R. Singh, Agrawal, chemical engineering professor Fabio H. Ribeiro and W. Nicholas Delgass, the Maxine Spencer Nichols Professor of Chemical Engineering.

Agrawal, Ribeiro and Delgass are developing reactors and catalysts to experimentally demonstrate the concept. Another paper by Agrawal and Singh addressing various biofuels processes, including fast-hydropyrolysis-hydrodeoxygenation, also appeared in June in the Annual Review of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.

The Environmental Science & Technology paper outlines the process, showing how a portion of the biomass is used as a source of hydrogen to convert the remaining biomass to liquid fuel.

“Another major thrust of this research is to provide guidelines on the potential liquid-fuel yield from various self-contained processes and augmented processes, where part of the energy comes from non-biomass sources such as solar energy and fossil fuel such as natural gas,” said Singh, who is now a researcher working at Bayer CropScience.

The new method would produce about twice as much biofuel as current technologies when hydrogen is derived from natural gas and 1.5 times the liquid fuel when hydrogen is derived from a portion of the biomass itself.

Biomass along with hydrogen will be fed into a high-pressure reactor and subjected to extremely fast heating, rising to as hot as 500 degrees Celsius, or more than 900 degrees Fahrenheit in less than a second. The hydrogen containing gas is to be produced by “reforming” natural gas, with the hot exhaust directly fed into the biomass reactor.

“The biomass will break down into smaller molecules in the presence of hot hydrogen and suitable catalysts,” Agrawal said.”The reaction products will then be subsequently condensed into liquid oil for eventual use as fuel. The uncondensed light gases such as methane, carbon monoxide, hydrogen and carbon dioxide, are separated and recycled back to the biomass reactor and the reformer.”

Purdue has filed a patent application on the method.

The general concept of combining biomass and carbon-free hydrogen to increase the liquid fuel yield has been pioneered at Purdue. The researchers previously invented an approach called a “hybrid hydrogen-carbon process,” or H₂CAR.

Both H₂CAR and H₂Bioil use additional hydrogen to boost the liquid-fuel yield. However, H₂Bioil is more economical and mobile than H₂CAR, Singh said.

“It requires less hydrogen, making it more economical,” he said. “It is also less capital intensive than conventional processes and can be built on a smaller scale, which is one of the prerequisites for the conversion of the low-energy density biomass to liquid fuel. So H₂Bioil offers a solution for the interim time period, when crude oil prices might be higher but natural gas and biomass to supply hydrogen to the H₂Bioil process might be economically competitive.”

The research was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and is affiliated with the Energy Center at Purdue’s Discovery Park.

Accessed & published by Henry Sapiecha

Biological Engineers Generate

Natural Gas with Bacteria

October 1, 2006 — A new kind of waste digester uses two different strains of bacteria in different tanks. This would normally take place in the same environment, but microbiologists have now separated it into two stages that increases natural-gas production. The technology increases efficiency and can turn three tons of food scraps into enough energy to power 25 homes for a day.

DAVIS, Calif. — There’s a new twist on the old adage, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Now that trash may be another man’s power. Researchers in California are turning garbage into bio-gas that may one day provide the electricity in your home.

Trash could soon be powering your home. A new digester can transform it into energy. It uses two strains of bacteria to convert waste into bio-gas. Most digesters store both bacteria in the same tank, which makes the process unpredictable and slow. But not this digester.

“Zhang’s process takes the two bacteria and separates them into two separate environments,” Dave Konwinski, the director of OnSite Power Systems in Davis, Calif., tells DBIS.

This new and improved digester is the brain child of Biological Engineer Ruihong Zhang. She and her students at UC Davis first built its prototype in the lab. She’s thrilled her new technology is being put to use in the real world.

“It’s a new technology … So it’s like a child grow into adult,” she says.

The digester will turn three tons of food scraps into energy for 25 houses a day. But it’s not just for homes. The digester could be especially useful to fuel processing plants. It s scheduled to be up and running this fall. OnSite Power Systems plans to market it in several states in the next couple of years, including California, Wisconsin and Minnesota.

“We can actually scale a digester to fit their current operations, fill it right at their operations, take the waste stream into the digester, and the energy right back into the plant,” Konwinski says. “It will make a substantial dent in our current energy requirement for petroleum.”

It’s a win-win-win situation for the environment, industry and consumers.

BACKGROUND: Environmental engineers at the University of California, Davis, are building a full-scale anaerobic digester that can convert any type of solid organic waste into electricity — even leftovers from restaurants. The system is part of the $100,000 Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD pilot project), but an even larger digester system is being put into place in San Francisco.

HOW IT WORKS: In the process, food waste is collected from restaurants and institutions and then fed to bacteria that thrive in low-oxygen environments. It’s called anaerobic digestion, a naturally occurring process of decomposition. One type of bacteria turns carbohydrates into simple sugars, amino acids and fatty acids. A second group of bacteria eats those compounds and turns them into hydrogen gas, carbon dioxide, and acetic acid — the primary component of vinegar. Then a third group of bacteria takes those broken-down compounds and turns them into methane and carbon dioxide. Between 60 and 80 percent becomes methane. The methane can be used as fuel for an internal combustion engine that provides electricity.

TYPES OF DIGESTION: Anaerobic digestion is not the same thing as human digestion, since the type of bacteria that produce methane don’t live in the human digestive tract. Industrial anaerobic digesters can also harness this natural process to treat waste, provide heat, and increase nutrients in soil. They are most commonly used for sewage treatment and for managing animal waste.

BENEFITS: The goal of SMUD is to obtain 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources such as wind, solar, and biodegradable matter by 2011. Currently SMUD derives 10 percent of its electricity from renewable sources, of which biomass accounts for 2.5 percent. The UC-Davis digester would keep food and other biodegradable waste out of landfills; food leftovers account for 18 percent of a landfill’s contents. One tone of leftover food can produce enough fuel to power 18 homes for one day.

WHAT ARE EXTREMOPHILES? An extremophile is any microbe that thrives in extreme conditions, such as temperature (extreme heat or cold), pressure, salinity, low oxygen environments, or high concentrations of hostile chemicals. Most extremophiles belong to a class known as archaeobacteria, but certain species of worm, crustacean and krill can also be considered extremophiles.

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc., contributed to the information

Sourced and published by Henry Sapiecha 7th June 2010

Main component and caloricity of biomass gas are different for difference of characteristic of biomass fuel and gasification method.

Through strict cleaning and thermal cracking, the dust & tar content of biomass gas are very tiny, which can meet the requirement for the internal-combustion engines normal operation.

Sourced and published by Henry Sapiecha 19th July 2009

Mouscron – 17.6MW biofuel installation – December 2006

In December 2006 Electrawinds started operating a second biofuel installation in Mouscron. This plant has a capacity of 17.6MW and provides green power for approximately 44,000 families on an annual basis. Sourced and published by Henry Sapiecha 18th July 2009

Projects using green power

Evolis in Belgium

Biofuel Material Firm in

Singapore -

BIO DIESEL PLANT

Barbados nut – Psyhcic nut – Bio diesel plant

Toyota Tsusho Corp announced June 10, 2009, that it made investment in JOil Pty Ltd, a Singapore-based company researching and marketing plants for biofuel raw materials.

Toyota Tsusho is planning to start operating a seed and seedling business for “jatropha,” a non-food plant used as a material for biofuel, in Latin America with the view to developing jatropha farms in the future.

The company has been engaged in the biodiesel fuel (BDF) business by, for example, participating in BDF manufacturing process development. In the company’s BDF business, material costs account for more than half the entire cost of producing BDF. Therefore, it has been required to procure non-food materials on a stable basis at a low cost.

It is possible that jatropha will be supplied at a low price in the future because jatropha, a non-food tree, can easily be grown even on non-agricultural land.

Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory (TLL), a research institute funded by the Singaporean government, promotes the selective breeding of jatropha and established a tissue culture technology to produce large volumes of superior plants. JOil mass-produces and markets superior plants under an exclusive licensing agreement with TLL for the patent on this technology.

Sourced and published by Henry Sapiecha 1st July 2009