GLycerol to Aviation and Marine prOducts with sUstainable Recycling

Glycerol - an abundant by-product of biodiesel plants - as well as other bio-based feedstocks, can be converted into valuable liquid fuels and reduce the carbon dioxide emissions in aviation and shipping sectors up to 70 %. The EU-funded GLAMOUR project plans to implement two new processes which could produce synthetic paraffin kerosene and marine diesel oil with an energy efficiency of 65 % starting from bio-waste materials.

Part of the carbon dioxide generated from the process will be available at high purity for re-use or storage resulting overall in carbon neutrality or negativity. At the end of the project, the GLAMOUR technology will reach a TRL5 level of innovation in the field of material science, process engineering, sustainability and socio-economic studies. This will be possible by combining a multi-disciplinary team from two universities, three research centers and five industries from six different EU countries led by the University of Manchester.

Objective

The key objective of the GLAMOUR project is the design, scale-up and validation of an integrated process that converts the waste bio-based feedstock such as crude glycerol into aviation and marine diesel fuels. The focus of the project will be a combination of high pressure, auto-thermal reforming/gasification using chemical looping to produce syngas and the integration of Fischer-Tropsch compact reactor integrated with 3D printed structured catalyst. The GLAMOUR process will achieve full conversion of the crude glycerol into synthetic paraffine kerosene (FT-SPK) to be used as jetfuel and into marine diesel oil (MDO) with an energy efficiency of 65% and the remaining gas will be converted into pure CO2 stream (purity >95%) and extra heat available.

These improvements would increase the overall revenue of existing 2nd generation bio-diesel plants reducing the cost for large scale biomass-to-liquid production processes by 35% and the CO2 emissions up to 70%.

The project will focus on the scale up of the two processes to achieve a final TRL5 demonstration for 1000 hours by using 2 kg/h of glycerol in a packed bed chemical looping systems and a downstream FT reactor.

The consortium includes two universities, three large research centres and 5 industries (including SMEs) which will combine fundamental knowledge on gas-solid and catalytic reactions, material design and engineering process design, economics, environmental analysis, societal and policy making decision.
In the long term, GLAMOUR could unlock low cost feedstock with cost decrease of 65%, increase the production of biofuel to achieve the overall bio-jet fuel production to move 19% of the EU passengers reducing the CO2 emissions up to 27 Mt/year and generating a scalable business up to 11 bln/years.

More information about the project can be found at the project website.