GEA Niro initiative converts CO2 into fuel and animal feed

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 taxation of effluents. The new process converts CO2 into fuel alcohol, proteins for animal feed and fertilizer for agricultural purposes. The basic idea is to feed 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. GEA does, however, have the necessary core competence and correct organisation to handle projects of this magnitude. 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. Algae 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 savings when converting CO2 this way can be significant especially as the worldwide tightening of penalties for discharging greenhouse gasses to the environment becomes increasingly severe. Read more...

This blog is written by Martin Little The Global Miller, published and supported by the GFMT Magazine from Perendale Publishers.