• Gasification in the UK – how to seize the opportunities

Summary

The TOTeM 40 took place on 22nd April at TU Delft and was co-organised together by Wiebren de Jong (TU Delft, and IFRF Deputy Superintendent of Research) and George Tsalidis (TU Delft). The meeting took form of an open workshop for general audience and was organised within the Brisk project (Biofuels Research Infrastructure for Sharing Knowledge) and was entitled “Gasification, a versatile technology converting biomass to produce synfuels, heat and power”.

The main focus during the meeting was put on two aspects, on review of the activities and achievements of each individual work package as well as on the Transnational Access (TA) activities.

The first part was focused on biomass gasification technology and its practical utilisation of in practice. There were two invited keynote speakers covering this field, Jaap Kiel from ECN, the Netherlands, was talking about the development of attractive business cases for biomass gasification and Chris Manson-Whitton, from Progressive Energy, UK, was talking about practical utilisation of this technology in the context of market situation in the United Kingdom.

The second part of the meeting focused on review of work and the achievements on the project work packages from WP4 to WP8. Please see the summary presentations of each of the work packages, done by the WP leaders, stored in the conference materials.

The third part was focused on the reports of the transnational access activities done by the TA investigators. The first one was Oskar Karlström from Abo Akademi, who conducted the biomass char gasification measurements in IFRF, Livorno His report is also available online on Brisk website. The second was Sebastian Fendt, from Technical University of Munich (TUM), who was talking about TUM cooperation with two TA activities done at TUM test rigs and the tests done at ETC in Piteå, Sweden by TUM investigator. The third was Andreas Gredinger from IFK, Stuttgart, who was talking about his experience of TA conducted at CIUDEN in Ponferrada, Spain.

The meeting was closed with the panel discussion session summarising the state-of-the-art of the biomass gasification technology, the commercial use of it and what must be done to popularise this technology more widely.

The final point was a visit to TU Delft gasification laboratories.