A new biomass-to-oil power plant in Europe will use a process developed by Envergent Technologies (Des Plaines, Ill.; www.envergenttech.com), a Honeywell (Morris Township, N.J.; www.honeywell.com) company. Plans for the facility, which is projected to begin operation in 2012, followed an agreement between Envergent and Industria e Innovazione, an Italian power generation company.
The agreement represents an endorsement of Envergent’s rapid thermal processing (RTP) technology, which converts biomass to liquid biofuels. The new European facility will be designed to process about 150 metric tons (dry) per day of a mixture of pine forest residues and clean demolition wood, and convert the biomass mix into pyrolysis oil.
The RTP process works by rapidly heating biomass at ambient pressure to generate high yields of pourable liquid pyrolysis oil. RTP technology is currently in use at seven commercial biomass processing plants in the U.S. and Canada.
Envergent is a joint venture between UOP (Des Plaines, Ill.; www.uop.com) and Ensyn Corp. (Wilmington, Del.; www.ensyn.com).