GEA Niro is leading a new initiative that will, when successful, significantly assist industries with a large CO2 footprint to become more environmental friendly and reduce operational costs spent on governments’ ever increasing lust for the taxation of effluents. The new process converts CO2 into fuel alcohol, proteins for animal feed and fertilizer for agricultural purposes, by feeding the CO2 to algae and transforming the algae to alcohol by fermentation and the residual bio matter to fertiliser. The exhausted yeast cells are then spray dried into protein powder for animal feed. The principle is simple, however the process implementation is difficult due to the very large installations and large mass flows involved.
CO2 is scrubbed from processes with high CO2 concentrations such as rotary ovens of cement plants. The CO2 is then introduced to basins that contain large volumes of algae which consume the CO2 gas. As algaes are polysaccharides containing fermentable sugars, these are easily converted to alcohol through fermentation. The alcohol can then be recovered for use as fuel, leaving the remaining algae bio mass and yeast cream for drying into useful fertiliser and animal feed respectively.
The process will be ideal for industries with a large carbon dioxide footprint that are interested in savings from CO2 reduction of production processes. The process is, as yet, experimental. Currently there are extended tests running in Spain for growing algaes in connection with a cement plant. Preliminary analysis suggests that it is a successful process for reducing CO2 emissions.
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