About

Currently, the  wet organic residues are mainly treated in biogas installations, or dried and incinerated, or… dumped. Biogas is not an optimal solution; there is need for innovation to provide solutions to convert wet residues into energy and to valorise other valuable constituents.

The objectives of SUPERVALUE are:

• Modeling, process unit integration and optimisation of the supercritical water gasification (SCWG) process.
• Development and optimisation of methods for enhanced recovery of the resources from solid and liquid SCWG effluents.
• Development of a refining technology for the production of inorganic added-value products, like e.g. struvite.
• Generation of different energy carriers, while treating wet residues by means of the SCWG process, including heat/cold, electricity and organic liquids, like e.g. methanol.
• Identification of the outline and characteristics of the proposed system and the boundary conditions necessary to make the small-scale biorefinery based on the SCWG process economically attractive for the end user, that is the owner of the organic waste.

Results

• Mathematical models allowing a comparison between different system layouts targeting at process optimisation, environmental and economic performance for four different business cases.
• Selection of suitable novel methods for nutrients (P, N, K, Mg) recovery from SCWG effluents and determination of the optimal production rates.
• A proposed method for fertiliser production from recovered elements.
• Spreadsheet advisory tool for gas valorisation options: compare different options (combustion, absorption cooling, synthesis) in terms of energy efficiency and Levelized Cost of Energy.