Welcome to our Q&A series, where our exceptional team addresses key questions about the NIAGARA project: its innovations in advanced biofuels, scientific and technological breakthroughs, and its transformative impact on the European Union’s energy landscape.
Today, we speak with Gabriel Acien, professor from the University of Almeria (UAL).
How do you believe the NIAGARA project contributes to advancing the development and adoption of sustainable biofuels?
“The production of sustainable biofuels is a large challenge from the technological point of view and the NIAGARA project will explore the integration of highly novel technologies to achieve this objective. The first major contribution from the project is the integration of the use of different feedstocks, from different origins, to enlarge the portfolio of raw materials suitable to be used. The second major contribution is the integration of technologies capable of maximising the conversion of biomass into final products such as biofuels. The third major contribution is to perform the overall process sustainably, reusing all the materials from the process to achieve zero-waste schemes. We hope that the successful development of the project demonstrates the feasibility of the proposed technologies as a previous step for further industrial development.”
What do you consider to be the most groundbreaking scientific aspect of NIAGARA?
“The core of the NIAGARA project is the conversion of heterogeneous feedstock into biofuels, then this is the major scientific challenge of the process. It is not only a matter of adjusting the operational conditions according to the composition of the feedstock, but also to model the overall performance of the process to make feasible the optimal operation of these processes whatever the conditions and composition of feedstock, to maximize the value and quality of products.”
From UAL’s perspective, what is the most significant aspect of the NIAGARA project, and why?
“The University of Almeria collaborates in this project mainly in the activities related to the supply of microalgae as a feedstock for the production of biofuels, the reuse of the effluents from the conversion process to make the entire system more sustainable, and the use of by-products such as biochar and treated water in agriculture. In this respect, the most significant aspect of our participation is to demonstrate that microalgae can contribute to making more sustainable other thermochemical processes that are performed on a large scale, also providing benefits from the use of microalgae biomass in other applications.”
What role do advanced biofuels play in reducing the EU’s carbon footprint, and how does NIAGARA accelerate this process?
“The production of advanced biofuels is a large challenge requiring the sum of all the possible solutions. The NIAGARA project will demonstrate the possibility of producing certain amounts of advanced biofuels from waste, in a sustainable way and zero-waste schemes. That could represent a relevant contribution in the sector, in terms of the number of advanced biofuels that can be produced following this scheme. However, more importantly, the successful development of the NIAGARA project will demonstrate the feasibility of integrating different technologies to achieve more sustainable processes that can be applied to other industries.”
Stay tuned as we continue exploring the groundbreaking work of the NIAGARA project in upcoming articles.
