DEVELOPMENT AND STANDARISATION OF
ADVANCED BIOFUELS USING GLYCEROL AS RENEWABLE SOURCE
Project acronym: 2G BIOFUELS
Competition/Project ID: EUREKA Traditional
Nr. proiect: 320E/2012
Partners:
- Institutul de Cercetari Produse Auxiliare Organice, ICPAO Medias
- Centru de Chimie Organica „Costin D. Nenitescu", Bucuresti
- Institut Univ. de Ciencia i Tecnologia, Barcelona
Project Coordinator:
Project responsible from ICPAO: ing. Crucean Augustin
OBJECTIVE:
The objective of the present Project is the development of a new advance biofuel component for transport in diesel engines and in heating fuel. The idea is to definitely solve the biggest bottleneck of the biofuel production, which is the co – generation of glycerol in 10 % weight that has collapse the glycerol production and resulting in a big problem for the biofuel industry in the management of this stock of glycerol.
The project involved investigations on process for the starting material conditioning and cleaning, investigations on the process improvement, pilot plant demonstration and validation and standardization of the biofuel to be use in heating generation and in transport according to the EN 590 of diesel engines.
Glycerol is a residual product of biodiesel production whose price decreasing with the increase of the biodiesel production. Considering the 2020 objectives and directives regarding the objective of use of biofuel, this production of glycerol may hider the accomplishing of the objectives due to the huge volume of biofuel required and, hence, the glycerol co – generation obtain that will drop the price of glycerol even lower than the calorific value, which therefore would be consider as a waste and treated like that. For example, in 2010 Europe produce more than 17 millions of tones of biofuel, which cogenerated 1, 7 millions of tones of glycerol, this is more than 3 times the worldwide consumption of glycerol.
For this reason, the project attempt to use this large stock of glycerol in a high volume product that has the possibility to absorb the large stock of glycerol using as starting point the IUCT patent PCT/ EP2007/ 057123 that includes the preliminary results. Later after the filing of the patent several gaps in the research were detected that will be solve in this project. Therefore the project is organized in five main work packages:
1. Starting material conditioning, including glycerol purification
2. Reaction optimization to solve the patent problems such in order to increase the reaction yields
3. Discovery of new compounds of the same family than the one described in the patent with improve properties
4. Demonstration of the production in pilot plant, including engineering design R&D
5. Validation of the biofuel as fuel for diesel engines in transport and heating pumps
The multiuse of the product will ensure the final commercialization of the product in tow sector of high demand of fuels.
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