Your choices:
1 Fuel: gaseous; 2 Biomass (digestible sludge); 3 Transport
What is your resource? | What do you want to deliver? | What is the service the customer wants? |
2 Biomass (digestible sludge) | District cooling | Comfortable indoor climate |
Biomass (fermentable sludge) | District heating | Electricity |
Biomass (solid) | Electricity | Process cooling (< 0 °C) |
Geothermal | 1 Fuel: Gaseous | Process heat/steam (50 - 150 °C) |
Sunshine | Fuel: Liquid | Process heat (150 - 1000 °C) |
Water | Fuel: Solid | Process heat (> 1000 °C) |
Wind | Local cooling (ind. house) | 3 Transport |
Residual oils/fats etc | Local heating (ind. house) |
One main market for gaseous fuels from biomass is the transport sector.
Biogas can easily be up-graded either by pressurised scrubbing where water is used to wash out the contaminants and to raise the methane content to 90-95% or in a pressure-swing-absorption (PSA) process yielding a similar quality. Since the fossil gas distributed throughout Europe in pipelines (natural gas) consists to the main part of methane but with a bit of heavier hydrocarbons (3-5%) in it, the addition of a little bit of LPG to the upgraded biogas makes it a copy of the fossil gas and it may then be injected into the pipeline system for distribution or sold as a car fuel. Obviously a strict quality control will be necessary but given that, there will be no major problems.