Identifying the ideal process design for a novel biomass-to-liquid plant configuration

Abstract

The production of 2nd generation biofuels out of agricultural waste materials such as bark or straw constitutes a promising way to provide part of the sustainable future fuel demand. While power-based routes are currently struggling with scaling up their technologies and finding ways to operate the plants with fluctuating power sources, biomass-based routes come with a much higher technology readiness level. However, the number of possible biomass-to-liquid process routes are manifold and the techno-economic analyses of these routes have been conducted in various ways. The route via gasification, gas purification, and a subsequent Fischer-Tropsch synthesis yields in hydrocarbons which achieve current fuel standards after a final upgrading step in existing refinery infrastructure. To evaluate the potential of a novel biomass-to-liquid concept, a methodology is presented that incorporates economic constraints into the process design, allowing the identification of regionally optimal process designs. The production costs of the concepts are estimated by setting up a detailed flowsheet simulation in AspenPlus® based on experimental data from the successful demonstration runs of the EU-Project COMSYN. In addition, an existing techno-economic evaluation methodology incorporated into the in-house software tool TEPET (Techno-Economic Process Evaluation Tool) has been extended to evaluate the process performance in different European regions and to include transportation and refining costs. The conducted evaluation includes two different feedstocks, three different process configurations and four different heat utilization modes, to allow the identification of regional sweet spots for European countries. At the same time the favorable process design for each region is defined. The analyses show that the techno-economic evaluation tends to expand the technology in regions with low feedstock costs, while the optimal process design is defined by regional boundary conditions such as the heat and electricity market. Finally, a map is shown to indicate the potential contribution of the investigated biomass-to-liquid process to a future fuel demand.