Novel technology could produce biofuel for around 0.50 a liter ($2.49...( A novel technology for synthesising ...)

A novel technology for synthesising chemicals from plant material could produce liquid fuel for just over 0.50 a litre, say German scientists. But only if the infrastructure is set up in the right way, states the research published in this month's issue of Biofuels, Bioproducts & Biorefining.

Developed by scientists at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), this novel technology is known as bioliq, and is able to produce a range of different types of liquid fuel and chemicals from plant material such as wood and straw.

Bioliq involves first heating the plant material in the absence of air to around 500C, a process known as pyrolysis. This produces a thick oily liquid containing solid particles of coke termed biosyncrude.

The biosyncrude is then vaporised by exposing it to a stream of oxygen gas, before being heated at high pressures to a temperature of around 1400C. Known as gasification, this process transforms the liquid biosyncrude into a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen termed syngas.

After any impurities are removed from this syngas, it can be catalytically converted into a range of different chemicals and fuels, including methanol, hydrogen and a synthetic version of diesel. This stage of the technology is fairly well developed, as syngas derived from coal and natural gas is already used to produce liquid fuels on a commercial scale in South Africa.

Bioliq is now taking its first steps towards commercialisation. In conjunction with the German process engineering company Lurgi, KIT is starting to construct a pilot plant based on the bioliq technology, which should be fully completed in 2012. Providing the technology works at this scale, the question then will be how best to implement bioliq at a larger scale, so that it can effectively compete with fossil fuels.

To try to come up with an answer, a team of KIT scientists led by Nicolaus Dahmen has used a simple economic model to calc
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