Spray Engineering Devices Ltd. (SED), a multidisciplinary engineering company dedicated to sustainable development, is partnering with LanzaTech (Skokie, Ill.) in a first-of-its-kind bagasse to ethanol project in India.
The project will be able to use other feedstocks and will be able to bolt on to waste and residue sources to provide a domestic feedstock source for low carbon ethanol.
To convert the solid biomass wastes to gases, LanzaTech will work with commercially proven gasification technology. The resulting carbon rich gas will then be converted to ethanol using LanzaTech’s commercially proven gas fermentation platform. The integrated technology will have the flexibility to process a wide range of biomass feedstocks enabling rapid replication at other locations.
The Indian government is encouraging production of cellulosic ethanol from agricultural wastes and residues that would otherwise be burnt on the fields and create harmful pollution. Not only does conversion to ethanol create a new source of income for local farmers, it is also in line with the governments biofuels roadmap to increase production of 2G, non-food or feed based ethanol across the country to meet its 20% ethanol blending mandate by 2025.
Today India’s emphasis is on ground transportation, but India, poised to become the 3rd largest aviation market by 2024, has an opportunity to leverage domestic, distributed agricultural wastes and residues and make ethanol that can be converted to a drop in sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) or renewable diesel. Using the LanzaJet Alcohol-to-Jet (ATJ) Process, developed by LanzaTech and DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). The LanzaJet ATJ Process can use any source of sustainable ethanol to make fuel. Beyond 2030, this project will provide new value for ethanol—not just in cars but in trucks (renewable diesel) and in jets (SAF).
In addition to fuels, ethanol is an intermediate to make all the things that we need for our daily lives and future uses of ethanol from this project will include production of textiles, laundry detergent and liquid soap, cleaning products, fragrances, and packaging.
Jennifer Holmgren, CEO of LanzaTech said: “Projects that can leverage distributed feedstock sources like wastes and residues are the future. We can no longer model our energy systems on large refinery scale centralized systems, when we have abundant waste resources distributed across the country. We are delighted to work with SED and show the world how distributed systems are part of the future of fuels and chemicals production.”
Mr Vivek Verma, M.D. from SED said: “Sustainability is at our core and we are driving forward positive change by adopting novel thermal energy recycling technology to deliver clean and green solutions. One of our innovations is patented Low Temperature Evaporator (LTE) which has bought an evolutionary change in the biofuel, wastewater recycling and agro processing sector. We aim to demonstrate our capabilities by utilizing non-food biomass of agriculture as renewable source of ethanol, green chemicals and polymers through this project with LanzaTech.”