Pyromaniax: Mississippi State’s SERC Group, among 18 Others, Developing Advanced Biofuels from Pyrolysis
by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) … A few years back, when reporting on field work at the Sustainable Power complex in Baytown, Texas — the hoots from a significant section of the Digest readership reverberated in skeptical comments on pyrolysis in general and the Rivera process in particular. “Pyrolysis is finished,” went the general drift of commentary from a notable number of academics and analysts eager to reeducate the Digest writers and editors. They cited the struggles of Sustainable Power and Dynamotive to develop their technologies in the harsh light afforded small-cap public companies in renewable energy.
The technology is straightforward in concept — with devil in all the details. Ground-up biomass, no more than 2 mm in size, is heated to more than 400 degrees celsius in a vacuum, which converts the biomass to a gaseous form, and in the presence of a catalyst
However, over the past two years, a remarkable resurgence of pyrolysis technologies has occurred, and the technologies have gained even more traction in DOE grants of late than some of their celebrated processing competitors such as transesterification and fermentation. READ MORE
