Techno-economic optimization of a new Biomass-to-liquid concept

The investigation of 2nd generation biofuels has gained in importance in recent years. Mostly because they hold the potential of reducing the greenhouse gas emissions of the transport sector on a larger scale. Inter alia, these alternative fuels can be produced via a Biomass-to-Liquid (BtL) process based on Fischer-Tropsch (FT) synthesis. The produced synthetic hydrocarbons can directly be used as drop-in fuels in the existing infrastructure. Though, the market launch of this technology depends strongly on its economic feasibility. The EU-project COMSYN (Compact Gasification and Synthesis process for Transport Fuels) aims to scratch at this economic limitation by combining a number of compact and highly efficient process steps. Besides the new gasification concept (developed by VTT) and the subsequent hot gas filtration, a FT-microreactor (developed from INERATEC) is attempting to achieve the ambiguous goal of reducing the biofuel production costs by up to 35 % compared to alternative routes. Within the project the DLR is assigned with the techno-economic assessment and optimization of the process concept. The necessary flowsheet model is set up in Aspen Plus®. Various different process setups are evaluated technically, economically as well as ecologically with the DLR in-house software tool TEPET. In dependence of several technical and economic boundary conditions, the techno-economically most favorable results can be determined and will be presented. Since the project also contains an experimental demonstration of the whole process at the test site of VTT, the flowsheet model and the subsequent evaluation can rely on experimental data of the project partners of VTT and INERATEC. The evaluation and optimization approach of this new BtL concept in dependence of both, economic and technical boundary conditions constitute an extension of previous work of DLR (Albrecht et al).