Your choices:
1 Fuel: gaseous; 2 Biomass (solid); 3 Process heat
| What is your resource? | What do you want to deliver? | What is the service the customer wants? |
| Biomass (digestible sludge) | District cooling | Comfortable indoor climate |
| Biomass (fermentable sludge) | District heating | Electricity |
| 2 Biomass (solid) | Electricity | Process cooling (< 0 °C) |
| Geothermal | 1 Fuel: Gaseous | 3 Process heat/steam (50 - 150 °C) |
| Sunshine | Fuel: Liquid | 3 Process heat (150 - 1000 °C) |
| Water | Fuel: Solid | 3 Process heat (> 1000 °C) |
| Wind | Local cooling (ind. house) | Transport |
| Residual oils/fats etc | Local heating (ind. house) |
Several high-temperature industrial processes, such as steel reheating furnaces, tunnel furnaces for the burning of building brick or glass tanks, will today be equipped with fossil gas burners. To replace the fossil fuel in these applications with solid biofuel, there are two main routes:
- The best solution in the longer run is to replace the gas burners with pulverised-fuel burners and then take the shortest route.
- The easiest solution in the shorter run is to first gasify the solid biomass and then use the product gas as the fuel in the furnaces.
The usability of solid biomass for industrial processes will depend on the sensitivity of the product to the fuel quality, but in a number of processes this would already not be a very complicated way to replace fossil fuel with biomass.