De-risk Your Gasification Project with Real-Scale Feedstock Validation

Gasification transforms biomass, biowaste, and waste feedstocks into high-value renewable fuels and chemicals, while simultaneously decarbonizing industrial processes. To ensure that these projects are both technically feasible and commercially viable, rigorous demonstration-scale validation is essential, as it mitigates technological risks and optimizes operational performance, carbon conversion, efficiency, process yields, syngas quality, and production costs. In this context, CENER’s 2 MW BIO2C fluidized bed gasifier delivers results that are fully representative and directly transferable to commercial installations, providing industrial partners with the actionable insights they need to confidently implement sustainable, gasification projects.

Gasification projects have historically faced technical challenges and uncertainties, which have often led to delays or even failed implementation. At the same time, rising CO₂ EU ETS allowance costs and the introduction of CBAM are creating a strong incentive to adopt gasification as a solution for decarbonizing high-temperature industrial processes, including cement production, steelmaking, sintering, and calcination. Moreover, gasification aligns closely with key policy objectives in renewable fuel production, such as RefuelEUAviation, FuelEUmaritime, RED III, and Annex IX-A provisions, establishing it as an increasingly strategic pathway for achieving sustainable industrial operations.

Successfully de-risking gasification projects requires addressing two critical factors: understanding how specific feedstocks behave at scale, and assessing the effectiveness of gas cleaning and conditioning systems.

Feedstock variability and complexity remain one of the fundamental technical challenges in scaling up gasification. Under Annex IX-A of the RED III Directive, eligible materials encompass a wide spectrum of agricultural residues, forestry waste, industrial by-products, and the biogenic fractions of municipal solid waste (MSW) and refuse-derived fuel (RDF).

These feedstocks differ significantly in physical and chemical properties, which influence operational feasibility, carbon conversion efficiency, process yields, syngas quality, and overall project cost. Although challenging feedstocks are often more price-competitive or even have negative cost, their technical risk is higher. Therefore, experimental validation through demonstration-scale testing is essential to identify potential operational issues in advance, such as sintering, feeding malfunctions, deposit formation, and equipment wear.

CENER is addressing these challenges by conducting demonstration-scale testing campaigns with industrial stakeholders, project promoters, and technology suppliers using unconventional and challenging feedstocks.

The BIO2C 2 MW gasification plant, operational since 2012, is a semi-industrial-sized installation designed to handle a wide range of biomass feedstocks and wastes. Its scale is crucial to replicate the process conditions of a full-scale industrial gasifier, ensuring that results are valid and transferable to commercial projects. Smaller-scale gasifiers suffer from higher heat losses, distorting key parameters such as the oxygen-to-fuel ratio and resulting in operating conditions that are not representative of industrial-scale performance. Similarly, in fluidized beds with smaller diameters, the fluidization behaviour and fuel distribution differ significantly, often requiring smaller feedstock sizes and producing inaccurate or non-scalable performance data.

The CENER gasification unit operates as a bubbling fluidized bed with a nominal power of 2 MWt, handling approximately 500 kg/h at pressures around 0.1 barg and temperatures between 650 and 1000 °C. It operates in two modes: air gasification and steam plus oxygen gasification, with inertization using CO₂, and features semi-continuous bed discharge, allowing a wide range of biomass and waste feedstocks to be tested. The syngas cleaning pilot facility treats up to 100 Nm³/h of syngas and removes water and contaminants generated during gasification, including tars, particles, nitrogenous compounds such as NH₃ and HCN, sulphur compounds such as H₂S and COS, halides including HCl and HF.

CENER has tested a broad spectrum of challenging feedstocks, including for example municipal park and garden waste, loose chopped straw, eucalyptus forest residues, cereal straw pellets, pine forest residues, biostabilized material from MSW mixed with forest woodchips, mixed agricultural residues containing olive pomace and eucalyptus forest residue, and RDF. These materials typically exhibit a bulk density of 130–500 kg/m³, moisture content below 20–30%, particle size under 20 mm, fines (<1 mm) less than 18%, and ash content between 13–20% on a dry basis.

The scope of testing at BIO2C encompasses feedstock chipping and drying, cold feeding tests, gasification and syngas cleaning experiments, and detailed characterization of syngas composition, feedstock, biochar, and bed material. Moreover, comprehensive mass and energy balances are performed, along with contaminant sampling and analysis of tars, particulates, NH₃, HCN, H₂S, COS, HCl, and HF.

It is clear that gasification holds significant potential for converting biomass, biowaste, and waste feedstocks into high-value renewable fuels and chemicals, while simultaneously decarbonizing high-temperature industrial processes under the increasing pressure of CO₂ allowance costs.

While challenging feedstocks are a great opportunity since they can offer economic advantages, their higher technological risk makes rigorous demonstration-scale validation essential. To address this, CENER is conducting multiple industrial testing campaigns at the 2 MW BIO2C fluidized bed gasification unit, systematically evaluating operational feasibility, carbon conversion efficiency, process yields, syngas quality, and production costs across a wide range of demanding feedstocks. Conducting tests at demonstration scale ensures that results are representative and directly transferable to future commercial installations, providing industrial partners with the insights they need to confidently de-risk their gasification projects and accelerate the deployment of sustainable, high-temperature industrial solutions.

 Real-scale feedstock validation is the key to reducing technical risk for industrial gasification projects development!