Tag: Waste

SunGas Renewables Inc. has formed a new subsidiary, Beaver Lake Renewable Energy, LLC (BLRE), to construct a new green methanol production facility in central Louisiana. The project will have a capacity of 400,000 t/a of green methanol, using gasified biomass, specifically wood fibre from local, sustainably-managed forests as feedstock. The methanol will have a negative carbon intensity through sequestration of the nearly 1.0 million t/a of carbon dioxide produced by the project, which will be executed by Denbury Carbon Solutions. The methanol will then be used as a clean marine fuel by A.P. Moller–Maersk, which is building a fleet of methanol-powered container vessels.

Metso is launching an advanced sustainable battery black mass recycling process as part of its battery minerals technology offering, which covers concentration and hydrometallurgical processing as well as related services. Demand for battery minerals is increasing sharply with the ongoing transition to clean energy sources. An electric car battery weighs approximately 200 kg. Recycling of black mass from batteries with Metso’s process can reduce up to 60% of embedded carbon compared to use of virgin materials and enables the treatment of mechanically separated and shredded batteries for recovering battery raw materials like nickel, cobalt, and lithium, as well as manganese and copper.

Evaporation and crystallisation are widely used throughout the fertilizer industry. These powerful production processes are helping fertilizer manufacturers diversify their product portfolios, improve profitability and meet sustainability goals.

In September last year, one of the largest mining equipment and technology deals in history closed when FLSmidth finally completed its purchase of thyssenkrupp Mining. We look at the implications for the fertilizer sector and phosphate and potash mining.

Gasification, particularly of waste and biomass, is seeing interest as sustainable sources of syngas. But there are both technical and commercial challenges to wider adoption.

The world’s most common syngas production method remains steam methane reforming, a process which has a substantial CO2 footprint as the necessary reaction heat is supplied by combustion of hydrocarbons. Topsoe’s eREACT™ technology allows for the first-of-its-kind electrification of the traditional SMR process. The reaction heat for eREACT™ is instead generated directly by (renewable) electricity, thereby eliminating the flue gas altogether. Having gone through scale-up from bench scale to industrially relevant pilot scale the technology is now ready for industrial application.

Fulcrum BioEnergy says that it has successfully produced low-carbon synthetic crude oil using landfill waste as a feedstock at its Sierra BioFuels Plant, the world’s first commercial-scale landfill waste-to-fuels plant. Located outside of Reno, Nevada, Sierra will produce approximately 11 million gallons of renewable, low-carbon transportation fuels each year from approximately 175,000 t/a of landfill waste.

With energy prices skyrocketing, sulphuric acid plant operators face a heightened challenge to improve plant efficiency. Martin Alvarez from Topsoe discusses how the company’s new high-activity catalyst, VK38+, can help acid plants maximise energy efficiency to secure important economic benefits while simultaneously reducing their carbon footprint.

The ERCOSPLAN Group of Companies held an international potash symposium on 6-8 October 2022 at the Messe Erfurt Congress Centre in Erfurt, the capital of the German state of Thuringia. The overall theme of this year’s event was: the exploration, extraction and processing of mineral salts – as well as the creation and use of underground cavities in the saline host rock.

Fischer-Tropsch technology has long offered alternative production routes to synthetic fuels, but has struggled to make a use case outside of some niche applications. Could the greening of the chemical industry offer another way forward for the technology?