Bio-CCS - “Research centre for low-carbon energy technologies”

Abstract

This issue is dedicated to the publication of research results from the project entitled “Research centre for low-carbon energy technologies”, in short Bio-CCS that has been successful in the OP RDE “Excellent research call” in 2017. The project is running from 2018 until mid of 2023 and it is coordinated by the Department of Energy Engineering of Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at the CTU in Prague. Two other department at the Faculty cooperate in the project, namely Department of Process Engineering and Department of Environmental Engineering. Additionally, Faculty of Nuclear Sciences of the CTU participates in the project, and the other institutions forming the consortium are Brno University of Technology, VSB-Technical University Ostrava and Institute of Thermomechanics of the Czech Academy of Sciences.

The project activities are focused on research in the so-called BECCS field (i.e. Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage), which means CO₂ capture processes from a bioenergy resource. It means that the final CO₂ balance in energy conversion of such a fuel becomes CO₂ negative. The project particularly concerns processes of fluidized bed oxyfuel combustion and low-CO₂ progressive gasification and pyrolysis of biofuels. These two main activities are focused on process characterization and optimization as well as investigation of fundamental principles in the processes and minimizing of impacts of these processes to the environment. The research activities are strongly supported by experimental approaches that include testing plants in the pilot-scale size, enabling transfer of the research results into industrial scale. A part of the project is also dedicated to the usage of CO₂ from the oxyfuel combustion and syngas form the gasification as a feedstock for 3rd and 4th generation biofuels production. The energy conversions are amended with activities that concern pre-conversion biofuel treatment and approaches for CO₂ cleaning and dewatering that has to be done prior to further utilization or transport for final storage. This concerns e.g. condensing heat exchangers, optionally with specific materials like hollow fibers, or contactless condensation. A part of the research activities concerns mathematical modeling and numerical simulation of the processes.