Research program

The Black Liquor Gasification research program is funded by the forest companies Kappa Kraftliner, SCA, Svea skog, and Södra, Vattenfall, Chemrec, The Swedish energy agency, the research foundation Mistra, and the authority of Norrbotten. The partners in the program are ETC (coordinator), Luleå University of Technology (LTU), Umeå University (UmU), Chalmers University of Technology (CTH), STFI, and Swedish Corrosion Institute.

The objective with the program is to coordinate Swedish research in black liquor gasification, in collaboration with forest industry and equipment suppliers, and pursue theoretical and experimental research on the process and thereby solve important technical problems and gain expertise and develop experimental resources for this technology.

The Black Liquor Gasification research program is organised in five work packages:

1. Experiments in DP-1: In-situ measurements and advanced chemical analysis of gas and smelt composition.
2. Applied process chemistry: Studies of intermediate products and internal processes in the hot reactor, the quench and downstream components.
3. Mill integration and system aspects.
4. Process modelling.
5. Underpinning process chemistry: Development of fundamental models, determination of uncertain thermodynamic data and small scale experiments.

A scientific council consisting of the list of persons below will meet with the researchers regularly for a status review of the different sub projects and to give viewpoints on the directions in these:

· Peter Axegård, STFI
· Mikko Hupa, Åbo Akademi
· Adriaan van Heiningen, University of Maine
· Jim Frederick, IPST

Development plant

Chemrec AB is running a technology development program in parallel with the
underpinning research program. Contact Chemrec for more details about the technical
development.

The large scale experiments in the research program will be conducted in the Chemrec development plant (DP-1) at the laboratory of ETC (see schematic figure below). The DP-1 is designed for gasification of about 20 ton/day of black liquor and operate at about 30 bar and 1000 C. In addition to the planned research Chemrec AB will use the DP-1 for the design optimisation and verification of the new pressurised black liquor gasification process.