Natural gas enhanced biomass to liquids: Project development and modeling

The Renewable Fuels Standard program mandates the production of 15 billion gallons per year of liquid transportation fuels from cellulosic biomass by 2022. Praxair has developed a natural gas enhanced biomass to liquids process that increases liquid fuel yield by 2.5 times versus the base case of straight biomass to liquids. Based on this process, Praxair recently completed a comprehensive feasibility study for the conversion of 900 bone dry tons/day of wood chips to Fischer–Tropsch liquids at a specific site in Southeastern US. However, the effort was time consuming and labor intensive. With a better modeling platform, the activity could have been executed more efficiently. Given the drive to reduce dependence on foreign oil, there will continue to be such project development activities. A concerted focus on developing a modeling tool for project development could result in valuable contributions from the process optimization community to the energy/renewable energy market.