Abstract
This paper explores the environmental and economic aspects of fast pyrolytic conversion of lignin, obtained from 2G ethanol plants, to transport fuels for both the marine and automotive markets. Various scenarios are explored, pertaining to aggregation of lignin from several sites, alternative energy carries to replace lignin, transport modalities, and allocation methodology. The results highlight two critical factors that ultimately determine the economic and/or environmental fuel viability. The first factor, the logistics scheme, exhibited the disadvantage of the centralized approach, owing to prohibitively expensive transportation costs of the low energy-dense lignin. Life cycle analysis (LCA) displayed the second critical factor related to alternative energy carrier selection. Natural gas (NG) chosen over additional biomass boosts well-to-wheel greenhouse gas emissions (WTW GHG) to a level incompatible with the reduction targets set by the U.S. renewable fuel standard (RFS). Adversely, the process’ economics revealed higher profits vs. fossil energy carrier.
Highlights
Numerous studies have reported significant environmental benefits of 2G relative to 1G ethanol production (Sims et al, 2010; Dias et al, 2011; Menten et al, 2013)
Energy carriers and interest rate Lignin stillage price, assuming that lignin is displaced by natural gas with price of 2.8 $/GJ Lignin stillage price, assuming that lignin is displaced by corn stover with total price of 73 $/DT of corn stover, including purchase and handling costs Electricity price Hydrogen purchase price Interest rate
This paper investigates the environmental economics of two lignin derived transport fuels, crude pyrolysis oil and the hydroprocessed version thereof
Summary
Numerous studies have reported significant environmental benefits of 2G relative to 1G ethanol production (Sims et al, 2010; Dias et al, 2011; Menten et al, 2013). This paper sets out to persistently summarize the literature on lignin (e.g., ex 2G ethanol plant) conversion to transport fuels and evaluate the implied environmental economics. To this end, we first discuss the techno-economic feasibility of fast pyrolysis, arguably the most proven technology to produce fuels from solid biomass, as the lignin conversion process of choice. An important limitation of this study is that the analysis of pyrolysis oil concerns oil produced from technical lignins, rather than actual industrial 2G ethanol plant lignin residue The latter stream contains, in addition to lignin, up to 25 Ä 35 wt-% of residual sugars and 10 Ä 15 wt-% of ashes (Palmisano, 2013). The impact of these impurities on oil yields and fuel quality is not taken into account here
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