7 April 2016

The Process & Energy department in the Faculty of 3mE at TU Delft has started a collaboration with a globally operating company in the oil and gas industry: Petrogas Gas Systems B.V. Thursday 7 April saw the Dean Theun Baller sign a collaboration agreement with Chris van Ree, Managing Director of Petrogas Gas Systems B.V. Also present at the signing were Departmental Director Bendiks-Jan Boersma and Wiebren de Jong, Associate Professor in the Process & Energy department of 3mE, who is heading the research into the gasification of dry and wet forms of biomass for producing syngas, the basis for substances such as diesel substitute, substitute natural gas, methanol and hydrogen. In the light of increasingly scare natural resources, this in combination with other renewable sources of energy provides a viable alternative.

An important part of the research is the modelling, designing and testing of a new type of gasifier, as well as ensuring that the product gas is free from dust, sulphur and tar, upgrading the gas for further catalytic conversion and scaling up from lab to factory scale. Together with Petrogas Gas Systems B.V., Wiebren de Jong will study whether this technology can be developed further and eventually put on the market. The project obviously has huge commercial potential for Petrogas Gas Systems B.V. The aim for the future is to build a scaled-up test factory. But in the meantime, both partners will carry out research in the Process & Energy and Delft Process Technology Institute Lab, which opened last spring in the department of Process & Energy of 3mE.