Photo: Biogasclean

Biogas technology to produce future green raw materials

Bioenergy Energy production Energy systems CO2 separation and CO2 storage Environment and pollution
DTU will be contributing to the development of a more profitable way of producing biogas, opening up for the production of biofuels for trucks and planes.

The Energy Technology Development and Demonstration Programme (EUDP) has just granted several million DKK to the eFuel project, which aims at developing a new and robust technology for transforming CO2 emitted from biogas plants into methane, which may become the green raw material of tomorrow in the manufacture of e.g. fossil-free aviation fuel and plastics.

The process involves retrieving CO2 from biogas plants producing up to 40 per cent CO—today released into the atmosphere. This makes production of biogas fossil-free, and the collection of CO2 also makes it more profitable.

The other raw material in the process is hydrogen, which is produced from water and electricity. With an increasing amount of wind power in the power grid, this technology is also one of the highly demanded ways of storing wind power.

The eFuel technology will increase the yield from biomass by more than 60 per cent, thus making it more profitable to process the biogas into advanced biofuels for heavy goods transport and aviation. Unique technologies

Over the past 6-7 years, DTU has worked on developing unique technologies for upgrading biogas to pure methane using biological methods.

“In the project, we will continue working with our technologies which provide efficient and fast biological decomposition of hydrogen and CO2 into methane. We must do this by upscaling and optimizing the reactors previously developed by us for use in the process,” says Irini Angelidaki, Professor, DTU Environment.

eFuel is backed by the companies Nature Energy and Biogasclean as well as the research institutions University of Southern Denmark and DTU.