Francisco Gírio: The SMIBIO Project
The first presentation was given by Francisco Gírio from LNEG, Portugal, about the SMIBIO Project, of which Mr Gírio is the coordinator. The presentation started with the classification of refineries, petro-chemical vs. bio-refineries. Then Mr Gírio showed some examples of existing large scale biorefineries (and concepts thereof) and gave some background information about the challenges that go together with this kind of concept. Depending on the location all feedstock must be imported from abroad and the feedstock provision has to be secured on the long run. This can take several years. Thus Mr Gírio identified price, logistics and feedstock availability as the big challenges for biorefineries. Feedstock costs which typically make up 30 – 70% of the production costs lead to high CAPEX costs which then result in large-scale solutions.
Mr Gírio suggests to overcome this by using multiproduct biorefineries. The project SMIBIO shall prove that “small is beautiful” and contribute to a positive social impact, creating jobs, solving environmental issues and improving quality of life at regional level.
The specific objectives are to show that small-scale biorefineries can be economically feasible by processing different kinds of biomass available in short radius catchments of rural and small urban areas. Therefore the best technological solutions under proper and real conditions will be modelled. Appropriate tools and methods to properly assess the technologies and optimize overall energy efficiency, environmental (LCA), economic (IRR, NPV and production costs), and social impacts (improvement in living conditions, job creation and new opportunities for rural development identification) will be developed for all small-scale multiproduct biorefineries to be modelled and simulated.
After shortly presenting the five case studies in Spain, Portugal, Chile, Mexico and Germany, Mr Gírio showed the first results of the Portuguese case which uses corn stover and swine manure as feedstock. In the case a promising scenario was identified that shall produce Ethanol, Xylooligosaccharides (XOS) and Lignin (for CHP). For this combination Mr Gírio could show economic feasibility for feedstock inputs ranging from 30,000 to 100,000 tonnes/year.