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Holding Out an Olive Branch to Biofuels
An experimental process by Sweden’s KTH Royal Institute of Technology involving the wastage from processing olive oil being used to create heat and power is underway in Spain. If it works, the system shows promise of converting organic waste into useful energy whilst cutting down on ecological damage.
US President Barack Obama visited KTH in 2013 to inspect the company’s emerging fuel cell technology and was also shown the waste-to-energy process using olive oil as it can be used in conjunction with fuel cells to produce energy.
While the project reached its apex towards the latter half of 2014, a smaller-scale prototype is operating in a production factory that deals with olive oil in Granada. The electricity produced by the project is used to help power the entire plant.
“I remember the President was very curious,” recalls Carina Lagergren, the research leader in applied electrochemistry who presented the concept to Obama. “He asked, ‘If my friend — a farmer — wants to buy this system to produce electricity from waste on his farm, is it worth it?’ And, I told him it’s not, for the moment, because it’s such a new thing. You cannot buy this and expect that you can save a lot of money, but in the future we hope it will,” she says.
Approximately 1kW of power is currently generated by the system and funding plans are in the pipeline to further boost it to 200kW, enough to supply half of the energy needed to run the plant. The company stresses however that the prime objective (disposing of the toxic waste from producing olive oil) has already been achieved.
Producing heat and power from waste is a triad of processes, beginning with the generation of biogas using a digesting tank. The gas is comprised of sulphur, methane and carbon dioxide and it is then fed into a reformer, converting it to hydrogen and carbon dioxide. This is where the fuel cells work their magic, combining the gas with oxygen to foster electricity and heat.
After the process concludes, any toxicity within the waste is negated and it can safely be transferred to landfill sites. “The idea behind the project is to show that it is possible to connect these processes together — starting with olive oil waste — and end up with electrical energy,” she says.
Without this, the milled and drained olives are disposed of, with pesticides and organic toxins forming a sludge pit, significantly harming the surrounding environment. To combat this, KTH joined forces with PowerCell.
“We fed the cells with the contaminants that are found in the fuel from the olive oil, or from the environment where the fuel cells operate, such as hydrogen sulfide and ammonia” Lagergren says, “Is it the electrode that suffers, or the electrolyte or the platinum itself, the carbon or the polymer?” she explains.
The answers will aid the company in establishing steps for purifying the gas and it will also provide valuable data on future use of the fuel cells. Still, the technology is far too expensive and unpolished to implement easily but it does show promise for the future of fuel cells, of which molten carbonate models are already used on a large scale.
Lagergren explains that the journey towards refining better fuel cells involves increasing efficiency while keeping costs low. In tandem with Lund and Chalmers universities, KTH is seeking alternative materials to the valuable metals that are used as catalysts in fuel cells.
“There are other ways to decrease the cost, such as work with the electrolytes. We try to do small improvements with the different components,” she says.
