September 29, 2010 –
MemfoACT, a spin-off from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology
(NTNU), has secured funding to turn its membrane technology into a commercial
product.
September 29, 2010 –
MemfoACT, a spin-off from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology
(NTNU), has secured funding to turn its membrane technology into a commercial
product.
Based on research
conducted at NTNU’s Department of Chemical Engineering, the company’s carbon
membrane is reported to transform low-grade biogas into biofuel that can be
used to power cars, buses and trucks.
The company currently has
three lab scale demonstration/test rigs in operation, where the carbon membrane
is being tested and verified on real biogas streams. The test rigs are all
located in Norway. The funding will be used to build a full-scale pilot unit to
produce the MemfoACT membranes.
According to company
officials, the MemfoACT carbon membrane enables separation of gases, without
the use of chemicals or other contaminants, by imitating nature’s own
separation method, used in internal organs such as kidneys and lungs where urea
and oxygen are separated from blood. Researchers say the special feature of the
carbon membrane is its ability to combine high selectivity with high
productivity, which results in low gas separation costs.
Researchers believe the
key advantage of MemfoACT’s technology is that it can be retrofitted in a
cost-effective way to existing small to medium scale biogas plants as well as
built into new biogas plants. They state other biogas purification technologies
– such as pressure swing adsorption (PSA), physical absorption, chemical
absorption and cryogenic separation – are highly energy demanding and have
waste issues.
The potential biowaste
energy available in Europe is estimated at approximately 400 TWh/yr, or about
13 per cent of the region’s 3042 TWh total electric energy consumption. Some
estimates say the EU could replace its natural gas imports from Russia if the
total energy potential in biowaste were used as biomethane. The total biowaste
potential in Norway is calculated to 6 TWh/yr.
