Last 3^rd – 4^th of May 2022, the BioSFerA Consortium met for the first time at the CIB-CSIC headquarter in Madrid.

After two years of online work, the 11 partners joined in a physical General Assembly. The face-to-face meeting has paid off, increasing the collaboration and ideas among the partners.

Productive discussions came out within the Consortium showing the interconnection among the research activities and how open debate and opinions sharing can improve the project’s final results.

In the afternoon of the 4^th of May, BioSFerA also led a workshop dedicated to the “Advanced technologies for green molecules production”. The event was organised in hybrid format with the collaboration of other two projects working on bioprocess research, CO2SMOS and LIFE BIOMASS C+. Interesting speech came also by Margarita De Gregorio, Director of the Spanish industrial platform BIOPLAT and representative of the Spanish and European bioeconomy strategy, brining important insights on bioproducts and their role on the climate crisis action.

4th GA BioSFerA Meeting

Advanced technologies for green molecules production workshop’s panelists

At nearly half of its way, the BioSFerA project is aligned with the planned activities and some first interesting results highlight the technical value of the BioSFerA concept. Achieved the potential assessment of its replicability across Europe at commercial scale, as well as the identification of the overall value chain, progresses follow from the biological treatment tests of the syngas performed at lab scale.

More in detail, Moorella and Clostridium strains have been already identified as the wild type promising species, showing high resistance to the syngas contaminants for both wild and genetically modified type. Currently CSIC is working on the recombination strains phase, planning to perform tests in real conditions and apply modifications in the yeast to produce C14-chain length fatty acids.

Encouraging results for scale-up activities are also obtained in the gas fermentation tests, where BBEPP performed experiments in bioreactor using glucose as a carbon source, as well as the oxygen tolerance tests in serum bottles. On its side, CARTIF confirms the Moorella Thermoacetica wild-type strain 2955 as the best anaerobic bacterial strain for gas fermentation trials in bioreactors and identify the so called Fröstl medium, characterized by the absence of yeast extract, as the medium with best performance. Next steps expect to work on the effects of the contaminant’s accumulation in a 1.5-litre pressurized bioreactor with a gas recirculation system (CARTIF) and on a continuous bioreactor of 10 litre capacity where a cell recycle system is installed (BBEPP).

For the optimization of TAGs production from acetate fermentation, processes in bioreactor with the select wild type strains W29 or YB-392 of oleaginous yeast Yarrowia Lipolytica have been explored. The experiments completed by CARTIF in batch mode show a high total lipid content and titer achievement, to be improved in the next steps focusing on the cell recycling and joint feeding strategy of N and C nutrients in the substrates, with the double ability to increase cell growth, prevent lipid inhibition and citrate formation. The better performance observed with the increase in the C/N ration of the feed have been confirmed by BBEPP tests, which is now moving further working on the development of TAG identification, quantification method together with the installation of a 7-litre continuous bioreactor with a cell recycle system. Preliminary tests on lipid purification analysis also involve ENVIPARK with a first approach in laboratory on a Y. Lipolytica bacteria culture sample provided by BBEPP.

Besides the lab-scale tests, VTT is working on the strategy for syngas cleaning modification in the pilot campaign and GoodFuels presented a preliminary analysis on crucial parameter for BioSFerA fuels market penetration to meet specific standards and products specifications.

On the communication side, the BioSFerA dissemination results is proceeding with the creation of a ResearchGate project profile, giving visibility through papers and activities shared with the scientific community. The official BioSFerA newsletter is also under development to disseminate the innovative BioSFerA concept to a wide public. Although the consortium has never met during this first year and a half, the team is focused on the project’s goals and showed productive. Good feedback also come from the European Officer after the acceptance of the 1^st Periodic Report and its positive evaluation on the promising results and works lead until now by the BioSFerA project.

CERTH team has successfully participated to the ECOS 2021 Conference presenting the paper ‘Aviation & maritime biofuels production via a combined thermochemical/biochemical pathway: A conceptual design and process simulation study’.  The presented paper contained a first orientation of the suggested concept from start-to-end, as developed within the first year of the project.

BioSFerA aims to develop a cost-effective interdisciplinary technology to produce sustainable aviation and maritime fuels. During the first months of activity, the consortium has proceeded with some preparatory activities including the elicitation of stakeholders and market needs, the definition of key performance indicators (KPIs) for the evaluation of the project, and the BioSFerA feedstock selection and characterization.  

 

 

The elicitation of stakeholders requirements aims to assess the potential replicability and the effectiveness of the project functionalities provided as well as to align them with the market needs in order to ensure a well-oriented project implementation. Thanks to this analysis, specifications and peculiarities that need to be met for each of the involved stakeholders (technology providers, feedstock suppliers, refineries, fuel traders, final end-users, research centers, policy makers) have been gathered, starting from the feedstock supply and conversion and ending to the targeted drop in biofuels for the aviation and maritime sector.

The selection of KPIs has been performed in order to assess the overall concept development in terms of a technical, economic, environmental and social perspective. In particular, 23 technical KPIs, 10 economic KPIs, 15 environmental KPIs and 12 social KPIs were elected.

Finally, the feedstock selection was based on the fulfillment of three main prerequisites: availability/sustainability (i.e. capacities for large scale applications), favorable technical characteristics for good performance at the integrated BioSFerA system and market competitiveness. The selected BioSFerA feedstock inventory includes agricultural (prunings, straw), forestry (logging) and industrial (wood) residues as well as airports/ports derived biogenic wastes. Based on this selection but also on previous successfully tested similar feedstock, bench-scale gasification tests have started.

In the next months the consortium will finalize a case studies analysis aiming to assess the replicability of BioSFerA concept at commercial scale in terms of feedstock capacities. This will be achieved via the development of potential commercial BioSFerA scenarios across Europe involving the BioSFerA feedstock selection and current techno-economic data of the selected countries. Moreover, CERTH with the support of the project technology providers will define the main concept for the overall process for the conversion of the selected feedstock to drop-in biofuels. Process simulations to solve heat and mass balances for the overall process will be performed, acting as a benchmark for the following lab and pilot activities.

On the lab scale gasification and syngas fermentation tests for the biological production of syngas are ongoing.

Gasification of different biomass (sunflower husk and ash, Greek olive prunings pellets, straw) has been tried in a lab scale gasifier in order to collect information for the future scale up, together with evaluations about the contaminants influence on the process (e.g oxygen, nitrogen…). In the meantime, four acetogenic strains have been tested, two Clostridia and two Morella, using the water after reformer with good results (both showed to be able to growth in the media). A M. thermoacetica strain has been also tested with similar results. Further achievements will be available soon allowing to identify the most suitable Clostridium strain in terms of growth and productivity as well as the best cultivation media.