Brownfields
Brownfield sites present some of the greatest opportunities to develop successful biofuel projects.
Thriving and dynamic biomass handling and processing industries can provide feedstock, capital and cashflow, plant and equipment based assets, a skilled labour force, and other resources to support new business development or efficiency and productivity improvement projects. The wood processing and agricultural product processing sectors are strong candidates for brown field projects.
Co-locating a biomass to hydrocarbon liquid fuels plant can provide the benefits of reducing your waste biomass streams or leveraging surplus feed stock supply side capacity and turning them into a viable income generator. Engineered energy integration between the existing infrastructure and new energy plant can determine ways to utilize waste heat and deliver surplus heat and power back to the main plant operations.
Hydrogen is required in order to produce high quality transportation fuels from biomass. Hydrogen production can be incorporated in a standalone liquid fuels plant but there is an opportunity for significantly reduced project capital expenditure, possibly even operating cost reduction, where there is surplus hydrogen available. Traditional fossil fuel refineries have the potential for integrated operation delivering hydrogen supply to the biomass processing plant, resulting in an overall carbon footprint reduction for the refinery per unit of fuel produced.