What is Biomass Energy?
Biomass energy is energy derived from biological and organic material. These include wood, agriculture residues, food waste, animal and human waste. These are thermochemically converted to produce heat, electricity or biofuels.
How is Biomass energy renewable?
Biomass energy comes from renewable sources, which can be regrown or replenished naturally. This is unlike fossil fuels and other non-renewable forms of energy, which cannot be replenished naturally.
What are the advantages of Biomass Energy?
Biomass energy offers a range of environmental and practical benefits which include generating renewable power, waste management, greenhouse gas reduction, and sustainability solutions.
Renewable
Biomass is renewable and sustainable because the feed source originates from organic materials that can be naturally replenished and are non-fossil sources. This is inherently different from fossil fuels which take millions of years to form and cannot be renewed.
Improves Waste Management
Biomass energy helps reduce the volume of waste that are caused by waste being sent to landfills by repurposing organic material waste such as food scraps, agricultural by-products and sewage sludge for use as feedstock in Anergy’s HTP process to produce valuable resources such as biochar, syngas and electricity. This reduces the reliance on landfills and yet still provides a sustainable waste management solution.
Largely Carbon-neutral
The carbon dioxide released, when extracting the biomass energy, is approximately equal to the amount absorbed by plants during their growth. This is a closed-loop carbon cycle that makes biomass energy largely carbon-neutral and an effective solution to minimise carbon footprint and environmental impact.
Sustainability Solution
Compared to fossil fuels when burnt, biomass energy potentially produces lower emissions of oxides of sulfur, oxides of nitrogen and heavy metal pollutants. This results in cleaner emissions and reduces risk of not fulfilling environmental regulations and environmental impacts.
What are the disadvantages of Biomass Energy?
Lower energy content compared to fossil fuels
Biomass energy general has a lower energy content as compared to fossil fuels. For instance, the higher heating value of dry wood is about 15-20 MJ/kg as compared to coal at 25 MJ/kg, where this lower higher heating value will require more wood to produce the same amount of energy as a lower amount of coal would. Despite this shortcoming, biomass to produce biomass energy is a generally preferred solution because of its sustainability and renewable abilities.
Initial cost
Biomass energy plants require more start-up costs to establish due to complexities and intricacies present, especially requiring scale to produce results. However, once established, these systems can help provide stable, long-term renewable and sustainable waste management solutions.
Feedstock can be inconsistent
The challenge to produce consistent feedstock is another limiting factor in utilising biomass energy. With inconsistent feedstock, the output product is also inconsistent.
The different types of Biomass
Biomass are organic and non-fossil materials that vary in many forms, and are not limited to:
-
Food waste (leftover food, fruits, vegetables)
-
Plant waste (tree bark, plant residues)
-
Animal waste (livestock manure and dung)
-
Municipal waste (industrial waste, sewage)
They each have their own potential for varying levels of energy generation and waste management, when properly processed using Anergy’s HTP process. This section highlights the versatility of this valuable resource and how it can be harnessed through Anergy’s HTP process to produce biochar, syngas or electricity.
Food Waste
Food waste includes discarded or uneaten organic materials from households, restaurants and even industrial sectors. These include leftovers, fruits, vegetable peels and spoiled products. Instead of sending these to a landfill, food waste can be used as a feedstock in Anergy’s HTP process to produce syngas or bioenergy. Utilisation of food waste promotes methane emissions, waste recycling and sustainability towards waste management.
Plant Waste
Plant waste includes the leftover and even non-edible portions of crops and forest. These can be forest residues such as tree bark, sawdust, garden waste and plant trimmings. Plant waste is utilised in Anergy’s HTP process to produce useful biochar, syngas and bioenergy. Utilisation of plant waste promotes minimising pollution and a renewable source of energy.
Animal Waste
Animal waste refers to manure, dung and faeces generated by animals, particularly livestock such as cows and pigs. These contain high levels of organic matter, which are potentially useful to be converted into energy. Utilisation of animal waste helps to reduce greenhouse emissions from manure and a sustainable waste management solution.
Municipal Waste
Municipal waste refers to sewage, sludge, discharge and residual waste generated by humans daily activities. These sometimes contain an innate issue with disposal, but is an issue that can be remedied by Anergy’s HTP process to produce syngas or bioenergy. Utilisation of municipal waste helps to reduce environmental pollution and promotes a sustainable waste management solution.
How can Biomass be used?
Biomass can be used as a feedstock in Anergy’s HTP process. At high temperatures and in the absence of oxygen, the biomass is thermally decomposed via pyrolysis. This breakdown converts the biomass into simpler compounds such as biochar and syngas. The syngas produced allows for downstream processes into clean fuel sources for power generation.
Electricity
The thermal decomposition of the biomass via Anergy’s HTP process yields syngas which can be processed to become a source of fuel for power generation, using a gas engine generator.
In other processes, the heat energy from the syngas is used in steam turbines to generate electricity.
Heating
The pyrolysis process of biomass produces heat. This thermal energy can be recycled and captured for the purposes of feedstock predrying or preheating depending on process requirements. This ultimately reduces the reliance on external energy consumption to preheat or predry the feedstock via heat integration and improves the overall system efficiency and sustainability.
Fuel
The syngas produced from thermal decomposition can also be potentially converted into other fuel forms such as diesel, jet-fuel, etc. This usually involves chemical reactions in fixed bed reactors to convert the components of the syngas into fuel forms such as in Fischer Tropsch reaction or methanation reaction, etc.
Anergy and Biomass
Anergy’s proprietary HTP process demonstrates how biomass can be transformed from waste into a valuable and sustainable energy resource.
By converting organic materials into biochar and syngas, which can be converted into other useful by-products through pyrolysis, Anergy transformed waste into clean energy solutions that reduce reliance on fossil fuels and minimise the impact on the environment.
This technology not only supports renewable energy generation but also enables efficient waste management and carbon footprint reduction.
If your business is looking for ways to improve waste management and reduce its carbon footprint, be sure to contact Anergy, today.
