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 a description of the environment for biorefineries (setting the scenes) in which Mr. Gírio first spoke about peak oil, climate change and global warming. Starting with this he led to the concept of biorefineries and identified the key challenges of biorefineries for the next decade. Among these challenges are feedstock availability and supply at low costs, advanced technologies, materials and market uptake.
Mr Gírio suggests overcoming this by using multiproduct biorefineries, which is particulary important for small-scale biorrefineries. The project SMIBIO is intending to prove the feasibility of the small-scale concept and contribute to a positive social impact, creating jobs, solving environmental issues and improving quality of life at regional level.
The specific objectives of the SMIBIO project 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 presenting the work packages and project members of SMIBIO, Mr. Gírio showed the results of the heuristic analysis of a Portuguese business case which uses corn stover and swine manure as feedstock. A promising scenario was identified producing as main outputs: bioethanol, xylooligosaccharides (XOS) and lignin (for CHP). For this biorrefinery, Mr. Gírio presented some preliminary data on the biorefinery economic feasibility for a range of feedstock inputs from 30,000 to 100,000 tonnes/year. Furthermore, a sensitivity analysis for enzyme and feedstock costs was also presented in which Mr. Gírio could show that the effect on the payback time is only marginal.
The presentation ended with the invitation to visit the project website www.smibio.net to find more information.