Professor André van Veen and his team at the School of Engineering, University of Warwick, have begun work on BIOGO, a large-scale collaborative research project with the aim of transforming the production of fuels from sustainable sources, thereby exploring catalysts with reduced dependence on precious metals and rare earth materials.

BIOGO brings together a world-class multi-disciplinary team from 15 organisations to carry out the ambitious project, the results of which will have substantial strategic, economic and environmental impacts on the EU petrochemicals industry and on the increasing use of renewable feedstock for energy.

The team’s intention is to change the process in which energy carriers are created, achieving sustainable production through an integrated, coherent and holistic approach. BIOGO researchers will develop innovative nanocatalysts to create a modular, highly efficient and integrated process, for the production of fuels from non-edible renewables.

The research into developing new catalysts will be carried out by undertaking modelling, kinetic and in-situ studies, which will then be and validated by extended laboratory tests to benchmark performance.

The four-year project culminates in two verification steps. A continuous pilot scale catalyst production run to demonstrate scaled up manufacturing potential for fast industrialisation and secondly, the integration at miniplant scale of the complete integrated process to gasoline production starting from bio-oil and biogas feedstocks.

Finally, a cost evaluation will be carried out on the catalyst production while life-cycle analysis will be undertaken to analyse environmental impacts across the whole chain.

Pictured: Professor André van Veen from the School of Engineering, University of Warwick.

A full list of partners is as follows: University of Warwick, UK; Institut für Mikrotechnik Mainz, Germany; Teer Coatings Limited, UK, Total S.A., France; C-Tech Innovation Limited, UK; Spike Renewables SRL, Italy; Microinnova Engineering GmbH, Austria; Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, Netherlands; Brunel University, UK;Tver Technical University, Russia; The Queen's University of Belfast, UK; A.N. Nesmeyanov Institute of Organoelement Compounds of Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia; Ruhr-Universitaet Bochum, Germany; Boreskov Institute of Catalysis, Siberian Branch of Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia; University College Cork, National University of Ireland, Ireland.