Wassup, EU? The Top 10 Trends in Europe’s Advanced Bioeconomy

#4 New Fuels deployment

We continue to see new fuels and deployment. In January, efforts of Eni’s research activities led to the launch of Eni Diesel +, the new fuel with a 15% renewable component, produced from plant oils in Eni’s Venice refinery using the Ecofining technology. Eni is the first company in the world to transform an oil refining plant (the Eni plant in Venice) into a biorefinery. Using the Ecofining technology it owns (developed in 2006 in the San Donato Milanese laboratories, in cooperation with Honeywell UOP), Eni transforms plant oils into a complete hydrocarbon product that overcomes the qualitative problems of traditional biodiesel.

Lignin was in the news last month with a report that RenFuel and Nordic Paper have signed an agreement to build a production test facility in Bäckhammar in the region of Värmland, in order to test manufacture an advanced biofuel based on lignin. The project has been granted $8.75 million by the Swedish Energy Agency.

RenFuel has developed and patented a method to refine the lignin from black liquor, a renewable byproduct from the production of paper pulp, into lignin oil. The oil, called Lignol, can replace fossil oil and be used as raw material in the production of renewable gasoline and diesel. Using the black liquor also leads to an increase in production capacity and profit in the paper pulp industry.

Meanwhile, bio-oil upgrading was the subject of a report on Luleå University of Technology producing renewable fuels from pyrolysis bio-oil in its facility LTU Green Fuels. By co-gasification with black liquor, a renewable fuel is produced. In late October the first truck load of pyrolysis oil came to the LTU Green Fuels plant in Piteå. It has now been successfully converted to a renewable fuel.

HVO was in focus at Statoil, which has developed a new HVO from waste fats and vegetable oil called Eco-1 that it says reduces CO2 emissions by up to 85% while NOx and particles emissions are cut by around 10%. The fuel has not yet been approved by standards authorities, so using as it can void manufacturers’ warrantees. The company says the fuel production cost is competitive with fossil diesel.

Meanwhile, 2G biofuels also advanced with news that in partnership with the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Air Liquide launched its bioliq pilot plant, aimed at demonstrating the feasibility of a process to produce high-quality sulfur-free fuel from residual biomass.  For this project, Air Liquide provided key technologies for the pyrolysis of biomass and gas synthesis as well as the oxygen supply needed for the gasification process. Thanks to this process now operating, approximately 7 kg of straw can produce 1 liter of fuel.