Heat-to-Fuel final conference

On 27th of April 2022, we held a closing conference and the last partners meeting of the Heat-to-Fuel consortium in Vienna. This concludes the development activities of the project, which has attracted a lot of interest from the industry.

The closing conference provided interesting key indicators of the project’s technical, economic and environmental performance. The integration of biomass gasification technologies, Fischer Tropsch synthesis, APR and HTL technologies enables 60% chemical efficiency of the process and more than 50% conversion of carbon from input biomass to liquid fuels. Further efforts to optimize the system will focus on improving water balance, more efficient integration of heating and cooling systems, and the use of HTL biocrude.

The consortium is committed to continuing development to raise the level of technological readiness above TRL5. Our company Skupina FABRIKA will play an important role in further techno-economic assessments and exploitation of the project. Together with the project coordinator (GET), we will work mainly to involve a strong industrial partner to build a Heat-to-Fuel demonstration plant. Due to the growing importance of decarbonising society and the EU’s energy independence, HtF technology is extremely interesting.

The techno-economic analysis we performed for the consortium showed that the investment of € 330 million in a plant that converts 300 kt of organic residues (bark, straw) and 500 kt of lignin (residues from bio-ethanol production, this is not lignite!) produces more than 150 million litres of biofuels per year. This is the amount of fuel consumed by the fleet of more than 100,000 cars a year, and the environmental burden of these vehicles can be reduced by up to 70% in comparison to fossil fuels use.