What is Bio-Syntrolysis

For the past year and a half, scientists at the Idaho National Laboratory have been looking for ways to convert biomass into liquid fuels at a far higher efficiency than current technologies. The answer: bio-syntrolysis.
To make a liquid fuel, they are using biomass to make a synthetic fuel via electrolysis of water.

Here's how it works: a high-temperature electrolyzer splits steam into oxygen and hydrogen. Oxygen is fed to a biomass gasifier--a machine that heats agriculture waste at high temperatures to produce synthesis gas, a combination of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. That synthesis gas, along with the hydrogen from the electrolyzer, is fed to a refiner to make liquid fuels that can replace gasoline, diesel, or jet fuel.

Previous research on nuclear energy and hydrogen was integral in identifying this development, which ties together multiple processes, and has electrolysis, or splitting water to make hydrogen, as its starting point. It is this addition of hydrogen that has many scientists taking notice.

"The key advantage is that bio-syntrolysis would extract far more energy from available biomass than existing methods," says research engineer Grant Hawkes. Using traditional cellulosic ethanol-making techniques, about 35 percent of the carbon from wood chips or agricultural residue ends up in the liquid fuel. By contrast, the bio-syntrolysis method would convert more than 90 percent of that carbon into a fuel.

"That means if you gather up a kilogram of biomass from a field, you're going to get two and half times the liquid fuel from bio-syntrolysis than you would from cellulosic ethanol. If biomass is a precious commodity, this way you'll get more out of it," Hawkes notes.
Problems:


Although it's a compelling vision, there are a number of technical hurdles to making bio-syntrolysis commercially viable and environmentally beneficial. The biggest problem: the process requires a lot of energy.

To reduce carbon emissions significantly over other biomass-to-liquid processes, the INL technology requires a lot of carbon-free electricity--1,000 megawatts of electricity would yield enough 25,000 barrels of fuel a day, enough for almost one million people, according to INL models. A full-size nuclear reactor could produce 1,000 megawatts, but even large-scale wind farms or solar plants are substantially smaller.

The approach also relies on tying together different technologies, some of which are relatively immature in terms of commercial deployment. Making familiar biofuel processes cost effective is hard enough: after years of research and pilot projects, ethanol from wood chips or grasses still isn't produced at commercial scale.

http://www.energyboom.com/biofuels/bio-syntrolysis-improving-biofue...


Idaho National Lab Developing Highly Carbon-Efficient Biomass-to-Liquids Process Combining High Temperature Steam Electrolysis and Biomass Gasification
http://www.ecosilly.com/2009/01/09/idaho-national-lab-developing-hi...

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Thanks, Chris