Pyrolysis has best potential for fuels of the future, suggests Axion Consulting
Pyrolysis currently shows the most potential for making fuels of the future, a leading expert from Axion Consulting suggested at this week’s Green Supply Chain conference in York.
Roger Morton, Director of resource recovery specialists Axion, says this process for converting biomass to useable transport fuels offers significant advantages over the alternative gasification method.
His address to delegates at the November event, organised by the National Non-Foods Crops Centre, examined the fundamental differences and benefits of both chemical processes, which use heat to create fuels for blending with existing fossil-derived variants. This year’s conference focused on integration between the biorenewable sectors being key to a renewable carbon economy.
“Pyrolysis offers much greater yields at lower economic and environmental cost than gasification. This is because it efficiently converts the large molecules in the biomass to molecule size in the final fuel. There’s no easy answer, but it offers the more long-term practical solution,” he said.
“Other processes, such as gasification, break down the biomass into smaller molecules (usually CO2 and H2) which are then combined to create the fuel product using processes such as Fischer Tropsch synthesis. Such processes are thermodynamically less efficient and, therefore, will provide a lower product yield,” added Roger.
Axion is a partner in Scarab Distributed Energy Ltd, which is looking to develop 10 to 15 distributed biomass to liquid fuels operations across the UK over the next few years. It brings specialist project management expertise in the resource recovery sector to the partnership’s work in developing novel ways of producing fuel and power from waste, including industrial food waste.
Axion Consulting is part of the Axion Group that develops and operates innovative resource recovery and processing solutions for recycling waste materials. The Group works with a wide range of clients, from Government agencies and local authorities to companies in diverse commercial sectors, on the practical development of new processing and collection methods to recover value from waste resources. For more information, contact Axion Energy on 0161 426 7731 or visit the website - www.axionconsulting.co.uk.