Issue 13, 2024

Piggery waste to sustainable fuels via indirect supercritical water gasification and membrane reforming at 600 °C: a techno-economic assessment

Abstract

Efficient management of pork effluent can substantially reduce emissions from Australia's pork industry by up to two-thirds, and contribute to the important global challenge of decarbonising the agriculture sector. In contrast to anaerobic digestion, which faces operational challenges and low yield, supercritical water gasification (SCWG) offers a high-efficiency conversion of biomass with no residue disposal concerns. This study presents an environmentally-sustainable process for hydrogen production through the SCWG of piggery manure coupled with steam methane reforming (SMR) via a hydrogen-selective Pd-based membrane. The proposed process enables the endothermic SCWG-SMR processes to operate at a temperature below 600 °C, making it compatible with emerging molten nitrate salt thermal energy storage systems. The ‘green heat’ supply options namely concentrating solar thermal, photovoltaic (PV), wind turbines, and hybrid PV/wind, are optimised for a design-point process thermal input of 2.3 MWth, considering levelised cost of heat (LCOH) and capacity factor (CF) as the objective functions. A detailed steady-state physical model of the plant is developed in Aspen Plus software. The proposed plant produces 14.4 kg H2 per h using 150 kg h−1 of dry piggery waste with a 73% methane conversion rate. The lowest levelised cost of hydrogen—obtained from the LCOH-CF Pareto front curves—is 13.8 USD per kg achieving a capacity factor of 80% at a renewable multiple of 2 and a storage capacity of 18 hours. Given the high cost of the produced hydrogen, the future potential of this technology would appear to lie in the production of gasoline/diesel, methanol, ammonia or bioplastics.

Graphical abstract: Piggery waste to sustainable fuels via indirect supercritical water gasification and membrane reforming at 600 °C: a techno-economic assessment

  • This article is part of the themed collection: Biorefining

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
15 dek 2023
Accepted
05 mar 2024
First published
06 mar 2024

Sustainable Energy Fuels, 2024,8, 2869-2879

Piggery waste to sustainable fuels via indirect supercritical water gasification and membrane reforming at 600 °C: a techno-economic assessment

L. Bardwell, A. Rahbari, Y. Wang, M. Amidy and J. Pye, Sustainable Energy Fuels, 2024, 8, 2869 DOI: 10.1039/D3SE01634J

To request permission to reproduce material from this article, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements