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 12 2023
Accepted
05 3 2024
First published
06 3 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

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