The EU Biogo project generates biofuel from wood waste. The decentralised production unit for the renewable fuel is housed in a mobile container.
The Biogo project’s mobile production plant generates biofuel from wood waste.
Tobias Hang / Fraunhofer IMM
Working with twelve research groups from seven countries in the EU’s Biogo project, the Fraunhofer Institute for Microengineering and Microsystems (IMM) has developed a system that enables synthetic petrol to be produced from organic waste. It makes sense to use wood waste and tree bark for several reasons: Firstly, this raw material is available in large quantities in Europe and doesn’t need to be specially cultivated, so it won’t compete with food production. What’s more, burning the resulting biofuel is climate-neutral.
The entire production unit is housed in a mobile container and can be used anywhere. "The goal of the Biogo project was to develop a plant that could fit in a 40-foot container with standard dimensions of 12 x 3 x 3 metres, and that could accommodate all the procedural and processing steps", explains Prof. Gunther Kolb from Fraunhofer IMM. In the first stage, the wood waste is heated until it forms a viscous pyrolysis oil. This is transformed into synthesis gas in a microreactor by adding heat, air and steam. As the second step, the gas is used to produce methanol. Extracting the oxygen from this gives rise to synthetic petrol.
Biofuel plants could produce 1000 litres a day
The chemical processes are accelerated by the use of highly reactive nanocatalysts, which have tiny clusters of catalytically active substances on their surfaces. The aim is to further develop these plants so that they can produce up to 1000 litres of biofuel a day. However, the prevailing political and economic circumstances are still unsuitable for a market takeover by these mini-factories: "As long as the price of oil remains at its present level, the new technology won’t be able to compete", says Kolb.