The Pyromaniax, Class of 2015: The Top 10 Pyrolysis Projects in Renewable Fuels

August 04, 2015

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by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) It’s been around for a generation or so — fast pyrolysis, that is. Though in the original low-tech incarnation — known as “cooking fire” — pyrolysis has been around since the dawn of man. But the numbers have never been so close to commercial, even in these days of low fossil fuel energy prices. Who’s in the lead? Where, why — and when will there be commercial-scale plants?

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In pyrolysis, the biomass is cooked at high temperatures. Some processes are faster than others, some use a catalyst, some do not. The end result is a conversion of biomass to a combination of light gases and a heavy bio-oil, which has been called bio-crude in some quarters, but bio-oil has had its limitations. Specifically, it’s full of oxygen, which is very different from hydrocarbon fuels (which are, as the name suggests, made entirely of carbon and hydrogen), which make them corrosive and unstable.

Some advantages of the pyrolysis process: it uses the entire biomass, there’s no CO2 byproduct as with fermenation, there’s no need for costly enzymes or other exotic microorganisms to be developed, and the issues with scaling up fermentation are avoided.

Downsides? Several. One show-stopper: bio-oil cannot be used as a transportation fuel. However, it can be upgraded into a stable oil via a process known as hydrotreatment, which extracts the oxygen in a reaction with hydrogen that produces pure water as its byproduct. It’s a process used in the petrochemical industry, and it has been used successfully to remove excess oxygen from organic waste and vegetable oils to convert them into diesel and jet fuel.

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The Top 10

#1 Ensyn ...

#2 Battelle ...

#3 Empyro ...

#4 Cool Planet ...

#5 Anellotech ...

#6 (Air Liquide’s) bioliq ...

#7 Avello Bioenergy ...

#8 Renergi ...

#9 LignoCat ...

#10 Proton Power ...

Another interesting sector — waste plastic-to-fuels

It’s not quite renewable in the technical sense, that is fuels made from waste plastics. But it is certainly a reasonable example of carbon capture and use and a perfectly good example of a frugal way to avoid landfilling (or sea-filling) waste plastics. So, while we haven’t ranked some good companies in plastics-to-fuels in the list above, a number deserve a robust shout-out.

For starters, what about www.pyroil.nl, who advise us that “within one year from now we will convert 150 thousand tonnes per year in a continuous feed of waste plastics to oil.” Another candidate worth a shout-out is Plastic2oil, more about them here. And, a number of people praise Cynar, which you can read about here.

The Next Wave?

H2Bioil

In 2014, we reported on a new process to convert all biomass into liquid fuel, and the method could make possible mobile processing plants. ... The new method, called fast-hydropyrolysis-hydrodeoxygenation, ...

TGRP

Last April, we advised that innovations at the USDA were bringing researchers one step closer to developing “green” biofuel production systems farmers can use to meet on-farm energy needs, or to produce renewable fuels for commercial markets. The researchers modified the standard pyrolysis process by gradually replacing nitrogen gas in the processing chamber with the gases produced during pyrolysis. The TGRP process was very effective in lowering oxygen levels and acidity, and no additional catalysts were needed. ...

Studies and assessments

The king of assessments is “Fast Pyrolysis and Hydrotreating: 2014 State of Technology R&D and Projections to 2017,” from PNNL. They’re making steady progress towards their 2017 goal of $3/ gallon finished fuels.

NREL has two cool reports — more on the technologies, less on the techno-economics, here andhere.

A more academic and lengthy analysis we liked was published in the Journal of Natural Sciences Research.

Robert “The Godfatha of Pyrolysis” Brown and associates have penned this good 5-minute read at extension.org. READ MORE

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