KiOR uses a thermochemical process called fluid-catalytic cracking that borrows many technologies from conventional oil refineries and, unlike fussier biochemical systems, should scale up easily.
It has installed a plant on its site in north-east England, run by Thermitech Solutions, that uses a thermochemical process, pyrolisis, to turn tonnes of waste material into gas and oil.
www.xylophane.com Sector 1 - Energy generation Sector 2 - Biofuels Employees: 25 Using a hybrid biochemical and thermochemical process, ZeaChem has developed a biorefinery capable of producing ethanol fuel from cellulosic biomass.
The second is to convert those sugars into drop-in fuels to suit existing vehicles, via a thermochemical process (using catalysts, extreme temperatures and high pressures) or a biochemical process (using enzymes, natural or synthetic bacteria, or algae).
Since all these processes are mediated through biological activity, they are slower than the thermochemical process.
The thermochemical process developed, deployed and tested in this study utilizes indirect heating (Fig. 1).
By making hydrocarbon fuels directly from sugar, Virent's thermochemical process would save energy required for ethanol production and eliminate the need for separate ethanol infrastructure.
Water decomposition through an experimentally-demonstrated thermochemical process manufactures the feedstock gases required.
This experimental approach allows optimizing the dynamic behavior of the thermochemical process.
Since diesel engines operate with excess O2, their chemistry of formation is expected to be comparable to this thermochemical process.
