Award amount:  $199,128

Funding recipient:  North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC

The goal is to demonstrate that the combination of torrefaction and gasification can provide for a low-cost, sustainable and scalable process for the production of liquid transportation fuels using biomass feedstocks derived from forest resources. The gasification and gas-to-liquids (GTL) process has been commercially practiced in South Africa, Qatar, and Malaysia for 30 years at a very large scale using coal and natural gas as feedstocks. Gasification of spent pulping liquor (without GTL) is commercial at the Weyerhaeuser mill in New Bern, NC. In all these cases specific aspects of the commercial technology can be applied to a biomass gasification/GTL process. But there are also significant differences between these commercial technologies and biomass gasification/GTL processes. This project will use torrefaction as a “pretreatment” that will convert woody biomass to a “coal-like” feedstock, and overcome previous limitations to enable competitive biomass gasification/GTL processes.

North Carolina counties benefiting from this project: Wake, with future benefit statewide

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