Typical gasification processes’ design, control and capital investment make it profitable only for medium-large scale with important throughput (plant > 1 GWh per year of electricity, with investment costs > 1M€). This falls well beyond the needs of the medium standard industrial consumption band, with annual electricity consumption between 500 and 2,000 MWh, i.e 3-4 orders of magnitude lower. Hysytech is positioned at this market gap. Synergy technology represents a novel turn-key product for the conversion of by-products from industry into fuel gas (syngas) through gasification. Synergy can be easily adapted as part of the production process of industrial manufacturing plants, with a treatment capacity of 100 kg per hour, generating 800 MWh per year of electricity and 600 MWh of useful heat. One of the biggest advantages of Synergy is making gasification affordable and profitable for small volume plants to be installed at manufacturing sites without the need of modifying the usual process or hiring new specialised operators. The selling price of Synergy gasification plant is estimated at €400 k including the installation of a fully ready-to-operate plant. This makes gasification an affordable and profitable investment for a medium industrial site, with a payback period of 2 to 5 years. This new technology has been developed after a preliminary assessment of some business opportunities on the field. The result is an existing prototype plant (processing 10kg/h) with the improved design of the complete plant, including the fluid bed reactor and gas clean-up system. Funded in 2003, Hysytech is today a pioneer in the field of process engineering and, in particular, in the design and construction of turn-key plants for fuel chemical processing, energy production and environmental treatment with its processes installed in more than 450 industrial sites. The Synergy project is a natural continuation of its experience and capability.

The project aims at the development of an innovative RES-based system for heat and electricity supply in order to achieve an almost energy autonomous multi-family building with regard to heating and electricity consumption as well as electro-mobility. This shall be achieved by integrating a novel highly efficient biomass micro-CHP technology based on an updraft gasifier, a new gas cleaning system and a solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC), a state-of-the-art PV system and appropriate innovative energy storage solutions. This system shall be economically highly attractive for future users and it shall also distinguish itself by virtually zero emissions of CO, OGC and dust as well as 55% to 65% reduced NOx emissions compared to other biomass CHP technologies. Consequently, it shall increase the penetration of RES on the multi-family house level and has the potential to significantly contribute to reaching the EU climate and clean air goals. The key innovations of the project are related to the novel micro-scale biomass CHP system. They comprise a flexible partitioning of product gas supplied to the SOFC and to a gas burner in order to cover the overall heat demand and to maximise SOFC operation at the same time, a novel combined thermal and catalytic tar reformer, new highly efficient and durable stack units and a novel compact SOFC system with integrated HCl and H2S removal reactor. Based on a 2.5 kWel SOFC with an electric efficiency of 44%, which is flexibly coupled with a 14 kW gasifier, overall efficiencies of more than 90% shall be gained. A TRL of 5 shall be achieved at the end of the project. The methodology applied to reach these goals relies on technology development tasks (based on process simulations, CFD aided design of the single units, test plant construction, performance and evaluation of test runs), a technology assessment part covering risk, techno-economic, environmental and overall impact assessments as well as targeted dissemination activities.

Photoelectrochemical cells (PECs) that mimic photosynthesis belong to the group of direct systems for converting sunlight to stored chemical energy. Common to those is the potential to become more efficient and cost effective because, unlike indirect ones, they do not involve unnecessary steps such as the sunlight to electricity conversion. Despite their greater potential, there is yet no direct conversion device that works on any technological scale. Indeed, there seems to be a large barrier linked to a poor PEC efficiency in absorbing sunlight and driving the catalysis for water oxidation (WO) and selective CO2 reduction (CO2R) to carbon-based compounds to store chemical energy. In addition, most PEC designs incorporate non-abundant or highly toxic elements precluding their future use at a larger scale. In LICROX we will implement a new PEC type incorporating three complementary light absorbing elements driving WO and CO2R. The latter consists of a tandem assembly that combines Cu nanocatalysts with molecular catalysts made of only abundant elements. The best-in-class transition metal oxides for the photo -anode and -cathode semiconductors will be used in the PEC to validate several light trapping mechanisms which have been proven to be very effective in boosting the light harvesting efficiency in thin film solar cells. To accelerate the endeavor of converting the triple junction PEC proposed into a working technology for transforming light and CO2 into compounds capable of storing chemical energy, LICROX brings together an interdisciplinary team of scientists with a comprehensive expertise in materials chemistry, semiconductor physics, electrochemistry, and photonics from EPFL, TUM, ICIQ and ICFO. Designing a strategy by DBT to overcome societal resistance, LICROX will set the route for a new scalable renewable energy technology to be initially pushed towards an industrial implementation and commercialization by AVA, HST and a newly developed spin-off from ICFO.