Pyrolysis Party and Who’s the Pilot Steering the Ship? BTG and GoodFuels to Invest in World’s 1st Marine Biofuel Refinery Based on Pyrolysis Oil

November 18, 2019

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by Helena Tavares Kennedy (Biofuels Digest) ... In the Netherlands, BTG and GoodFuels are preparing for major investment in a new biorefinery to support shipping’s low carbon fuels demands. Biomass technology group BTG will set up a new company that can convert crude pyrolysis oil into diesel fuel suitable for the shipping sector. It will be the first refinery in the world for an advanced marine biofuel based on pyrolysis oil.

The new facility will be operated by a new company named BTG-neXt. In the first phase, BTG-neXt will focus on building a pilot refinery for converting pyrolysis oil into 100% sustainable marine biodiesel for ships, in order to demonstrate that continuous production is feasible. Pyrolysis oil is made from biomass-based residues such as sawdust and roadside grass cuttings and is a sustainable alternative for replacing fossil fuels. Crucially, the new fuels will not make any concessions in terms of the sustainability of feedstocks.

Scaling Up

The new demonstration facility has a planned production capacity of a modest 1,000 tons of advanced marine fuel per year, with plans, if deemed successful, to scale up, in order to support the industry in meeting International Maritime Organisation (IMO) targets of a 50% reduction in Greenhouse Gas emissions by 2050, equivalent to an 85% reduction per vessel.

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Under the responsibility of BTG-BTL, the Empyro production facility in Hengelo, the Netherlands, was built, which demonstrated that it was not only technically feasible to produce oil from sawdust but that it was also a commercially viable proposition.

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GoodFuels intends to market the pilot volumes produced to further strengthen the commercial business case.

Venendaal added: “At present, most ships, in particular seagoing vessels, use low-quality fuel oil that is almost tar-like in nature, or marine gasoil, or diesel oil, all containing high levels of carbon. The potential for growth in terms of sustainability – driven by the IMO’s Greenhouse Gas targets for 2030 and 2050 – is therefore extremely high for this sector”.

The low-sulphur diesel fuel for the shipping sector made from pyrolysis oil will also ensure compliance with soon-to-be introduced global low sulphur fuel regulations.

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BTG has been working on developing the new technology since 2000. Venendaal: ‘We have been developing various building blocks over the past 15 years, which are part of several parallel projects still underway. In the near future, we will be integrating these building blocks, in order to realise the new plant’. Venendaal has good hope that the first commercial plants will also be profitable on a limited scale: ‘We are looking at investments in the order of €200 million per processing plant, but we are already seeing that many potential clients, due to market demand, would prefer building even larger facilities’.

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The technology behind Pyrolysis oil is quite fascinating. It’s usually not suitable for direct use as a transport fuel which is why BTG’s two approaches of treating the oil are interesting. Two different routes are currently considered to produce biofuels from pyrolysis oil by BTG:

Hydrodeoxygenation (HDO) of pyrolysis oil to produce an oil refinery compatible feedstock or final biofuel.
Syngas production from pyrolysis oil, and subsequently synthesized to a transportation fuel.

In the ‘HDO process’, pyrolysis oil is treated with hydrogen at elevated pressure in the presence of a catalyst. Syngas or synthesis gas is produced from a variety of feedstocks like e.g. coal, petcoke, natural gas and naphtha. Two different approaches are further evaluated within BTG for syngas: