Flexible polygeneration of drop-in fuel and hydrogen from biomass: Advantages from process integration

According to the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, significant effort is needed in the energy transition process to meet the milestones of the Paris Agreement. To this aim, the energy conversion of the biogenic carbon in biomass is a potent strategy to facilitate the energy transition. In recent years, scientific literature has evaluated, using numerical models, the process integration for the conversion of lignocellulosic biomass into high valuable energy carriers. In particular the combination of fast pyrolysis and gasification has been proposed. However, there is a lack of evaluation of the energy effectiveness of this combination. This work aims at quantifying the energy performance increase of converting lignocellulosic biomass into hydrogen, drop-in fuels, and syngas through the integration of pyrolysis, steam sorption enhanced gasification and hydrodeoxygenation processes, compared to a separated layout option where pyrolysis, hydrodeoxygenation, and sorption enhanced gasification processes occur in parallel. The processes have been evaluated using a mixed kinetic and equilibrium chemical modeling approach with the AspenPlus software. The results show that the integration of fast pyrolysis, hydrodeoxygenation, and sorption enhanced gasification leads to a significant increase in the energy performance of the convention route, increasing the energy yield between 19 % and 43 %, the efficiency between 26.7 % and 39.3 %, and the carbon conversion between 48.7 % and 73.1 %, depending on the operating conditions selected. The findings from this analysis not only demonstrate that the process integration of pyrolysis, hydrodeoxygenation and sorption enhanced gasification is effective, but also enhance the understanding of how such integration can significantly improve the conversion efficiency of lignocellulosic biomass into valuable energy carriers.