Today, biogas is primarily used for heat and power production. Because of the economic pressure in the power sector caused by large capacities of renewable energy, is necessary to find different applications for biogas to ensure economic feasibility of biogas plants in the future. One of these alternatives is to produce bio methane from biogas. Here, separation of CO₂ is the process step with biggest effect on overall efficiency of all treatment steps. The state-of-the-art for CO₂ separation in this field is: pressure swing adsorption, amine scrubbing and membrane separation. However, none of these technologies is currently economically feasible and it exists the demand for a more efficient and cost effective alternative.

Amine scrubbing seems to be the most attractive technology from a technical point of view and will thus be used as starting point to develop a new technology keeping the advantages of amine scrubbing and eliminating its disadvantages. Thus, the bioCH4.0 project will develop a temperature swing adsorption (TSA) process using a multistage fluidized bed design and solid amine sorbents. This new process also features full heat integration using innovative heat exchanger designs and a heat pump in order to realize significant efficiency increase. The main project objective is to develop a process to provide bio methane with higher efficiency and lower costs compared to the state-of-the-art technologies. This will also be shown in a techno-economic evaluation and comparison with other technologies.

The project outcome can be summarized:

·        Basic investigation (experimental work as well as modelling and simulation) of the new TSA process for CO₂-separation to provide bio methane with the following performance parameters:

o  High purity of the bio methane (>95%)

o  Reduction of the energy demand by up to 40%

o  Reduction of the CO₂-separation costs by up to 25% (OPEX and CAPEX)

·        Process development from TRL 2-3 to TRL 4 at the end of the project

·        Concept and techno-economic evaluation of a scale-up to 200 m3/h biogas feed and comparison with state-of-the-art technologies

·        Optional CO2-recovery when using steam for desorption instead of air