Description
The central objective of THERMOBIOCHEM is to develop a thermo-bio-chemical refinery to generate cost effective biofuels together with several added-value products from different wastes by integrating two complementary chemical and biological technologies. Waste will be subjected to hydrothermal liquefaction (HTL) to generate two main useful fractions: a bunker-like fuel useful, upon further refining to be blended for marine propulsion engines, and a wastewater fraction (HTWW) that can be converted by biotechnological processes into high value products. This refinery allows the integration of many types of carbon containing residues (e.g., municipal solid waste, plastics, agricultural-waste, etc.) as well as wastewaters from different origins (e.g., urban, industrial, etc.). To carrying out a project as complex as THERMOBIOCHEM where chemical technologies are combined with biotechnological processes the project has been designed as a coordinated project with two subprojects with the collaboration of the URJC chemical and envionmental engineering group and the CIB_MS (CSIC) biotechnology group.
The main goal of Subproject 1 is to develop efficient HTL processes to convert the organic waste into bio-oil useful as bio-carburant. For this aim we will tackle two main subobjectives: 1) Innovative HTL of wastes. We will develop innovative HTL processes to optimize the transformation of complex organic wastes into a crude bio-oil fraction. 2) Bio-oil upgrading to produce shipping biofuel. It aims to upgrade the crude bio-oil to liquid hydrocarbons like those contained in conventional fuels from fossil origin since it is a necessary step to produce sustainable shipping biofuels.
The main goal of Subproject 2 is to find biological solutions to recycle the HTWW fraction derived from HTL process. For this aim we will tackle two main subobjectives: 1) Microbial treatments to valorise HTWW. The main interest is to recover the bioenergy contained in HTWW to produce added value products by using pure bacterial cultures or microbial consortia. This subobjective will be combined with the following subobjective since we will study the use of HTWW before and after its pre-treatment by oxidation; 2) Physicochemical and biochemical pre-treatments of HTWW. We will explore the possibility of reducing the toxicity of the HTWW fraction by using chemical or enzymatic pre-treatments similar to those used for treating contaminated wastewater streams.
This project is suported by the Recovery and Resilience Funds from the European Union.
Members