Methanol demand is expected to continue increasing to reach more than 120 Mt by 2025 and 500 Mt by 2050
Objectives
The objectives below outline how the project will develop a credible pathway to a large-scale transition to methanol as a ship fuel.
O.1
Provide an ecosystem simulation platform that predicts energy efficiency (using the demonstrator as the case) with +80% accuracy.
O.2
O.3
O.4
Demonstration of a biomethanol
demonstration with 0 major incidents and 0 major unexpected emissions or spills.
O.5
Finding plant configurations that let us cover +50% of the market for 10.000 – 40.000 tonnes capacity plants based on biogas and hydrogen, with 3 plant sizes and designs.
O.6
Build a business case where you produce biomethanol to a +10% lower price point than competing synthetic methanol production.
O.7
Demonstrate the technical feasibility and viability of the business model for a wide range of biogas plant sites, covering +80% of Europe’s present biogas sites.
We offer an industrial-scale demonstration of the novel eREACT™- approach, with the possibility for scale-up.
We will set up production for methanol that can be used as both a ship fuel and as a chemical.
LCA analysis
The project integrates a full value chain LCA analysis, that will be implemented throughout all the work packages in the project, starting with developing the framework in WP2.
The state-of-the-art, with more improved energy conversion rates and less materials used, points to clear improvement in environmental impact.
Overall structure of the work plan
We develop the project in three phases.
Phase 1:
In the first phase, we develop the generic models. This covers frameworks to agree to model information relevant to biomethanol plant sizes and requirements (WP2), which in turn is built on information in areas such as environmental impact, cost impact, feedstock availability, hydrogen availability, logistics solutions, and more.
This is then used to build simulation models of plants and ecosystems, focusing on key unsolved areas such as energy integration with the biogas plant as well as hydrogen integration (WP3). Both of these feed into the plant design, where the size is also set and next the detailed design. We target copy-paste plant designs, as design is a substantial part of cost. From WP4 we get the key process module of the eREACT™ technology, which is then shipped to the next step (WP5).
Phase 2:
In the second phase in WP5 we demonstrate an operational plant, and validate our approaches (including the world’s first industrial pilot of eREACT™).
Phase 3:
In the third phase, all the project experience is next used in developing the tools to configure plants and value chains (WP6), that are then tested on conceptual designs (covering business models, environmental impact, and more) for different plant sizes (including considerable scale-ups from the demonstrator plant).
In addition, we have work packages for management and to disseminate and exploit the results.
