Sustainable Solid Biofuels

The objective of Sustainable Solid Biofuel project is to contribute to a zero-waste and low-carbon emission production of charcoal by evaluating the feasibility and energy efficiency of three different conversion technologies.
According to the IEA’s World Energy Outlook 2015 3 billion (more than a third of the global population) use solid biomass as wood, charcoal, or animal waste for cooking and heating1. Charcoal is one of the most widely used of the solid biofuels. In current charcoal production processes the gas stream from pyrolysis are mostly directly released to the environment which wastes energy and causes serious environmental pollution.
However, the production of charcoal can be improved to be practiced on a sustainable basis by careful selection of wood or alternative biomass source as wood waste or agricultural residues and further focusing on harvesting strategy and production techniques. In the conversion process it is necessary to increase the energy efficiency while reducing emissions. Further sustainability can be increased by processing the smoke that is exhausted from the kiln, that correspond to roughly one third of the whole biomass. Within the volatile components in the smoke there are chemicals which can be used, for example, as industrial cleaners or wood preservatives and thus one of the environmental drawbacks of charcoal production can be eliminated and turned into another product input.
Brazil is the world's largest charcoal producer2 consequently the state of the art of the recearch in this field can be found in Brazil. In this Sustainable Solid Biofuels project one of the leading universities of Brazil, the Universidade Federal de Viçosa (UFV) is joining forces with Avans University of Applied Sciences and two Dutch SMEs Privium B.V. and Charcotec B.V. to carry out the evaluation of the improvements that can be achieved in the energy efficiency.