Biomass to Sustainable Energy

SynGas Technology, LLC, (SGT) is a technology company that is developing, for the purpose of licensing, pre‐treatment and gasification technologies for the use in the production of synthesis gas (syngas) from biomass. SGT has also developed and will make available for license a patent‐pending integrated biorefinery process that combines the SGT gasification technology with existing commercial thermochemical processing technology which allows for the production of gasoline, diesel fuel, and high value chemical products such as ammonia from a variety of cellulosic biomass feed stocks.

A major advantage of the thermochemical processing approach developed by SGT is that it is capable of producing full specification transportation fuels (D‐4814 gasoline and D‐975 diesel) with proven commercially available conversion technology. This eliminates expensive product development testing and allows use of existing fuel distribution infrastructure. However, until now, the cost effectiveness of thermochemical technology has been a barrier to its adoption for wide scale use in renewable fuel production, primarily because no reliable technology has been available to produce refinery grade syngas from biomass. It is a common misconception that all syngas is the same; however, in order to economically produce liquid fuels, syngas must have a specific H2/CO ratio, be available at high pressure, and be free on contaminants which can foul downstream processes.

Current biomass gasification technology suffers from the following issues:

1. Limited to low pressure operation, resulting in high capital and operating costs due to the need to compress syngas after the gasifier to high pressure to be compatible with downstream processing technology.
2. Typically limited to air‐blown operation which further increases compression costs and equipment costs of downstream equipment in direct proportion to the nitrogen content of the syngas.
3. Utilize feed systems that are mechanically unreliable and are design specific to the type of biomass being used.
4. Suffer from poor internal mixing due to large biomass particles in the feed stock which causes soot, tar, and slag formation and results in lower overall efficiency.
5. Rely on excessive use of steam to minimize tar and soot formation which results in high H2/CO ratio syngas which reduces final liquid product yield by as much as 50%.

SGT’s proprietary feed pre‐treatment and high pressure, oxygen fed, non‐slagging gasifier design eliminates all of these problems to open the path to the profitable production of transportation fuels that will meet existing fuel specifications without the need for government subsidies. This integrated approach significantly reduces the capital and operating costs associated with thermochemical processing and enables the production renewable fuels at costs competitive to petroleum derived fuels.