description
- The EU target to increase the use of renewable energy carriers in the transportation sector in the coming years has already started to boost the production of biodiesel from rapeseed and other vegetable oils. This is leading to an immense increase in the production of glycerol, which is an unavoidable by-product from the esterification process. Since the volume of the glycerol-byproduct has already started to exceed the current market need, the biodiesel producers are requesting new methods for sustainable glycerol management. The GLYFINERY project is targeted to development of a novel technology based on biological conversion of the glycerol by-product into known and new, advanced liquid biofuels, bioenergy and valuable biochemicals in an integrated biorefinery concept. Implementation of the glycerol bioprocessing line into the biodiesel plant will improve the economics of the biodiesel biorefinery by enhanced energy conversion efficiency of the traditional raw materials and by generating valuable, highly demanded bioproducts. The GLYFINERY project will achieve the aim of the highly efficient process scheme through a multidirectional effort using new biocatalysts tailored by genetic modification for specific conversion routes, highly efficient fermentation processes for maximum possible conversion of glycerol into the target products, highly efficient methods for product recovery and the overall process integration. The individual processes are proposed to be studied in the lab-scale, and the most promising process scheme will be tested in the pilot-scale as an integrated concept for demonstration of the suitability of the GLYFINERY concept implementation into the large-scale biorefineries. The environmental and economical assessment will be performed along with the technological assessment for obtaining of the overall, integrated assessment of the optimized multi-stage process.