Shareholdings of Fraunhofer
Fraunhofer Venture
Greasoline GmbH
The Company
The greasoline® technology converts oily and fatty raw and waste materials to hydrocarbon mixtures consisting of chemical substances occurring in fossil gasoline, kerosene and diesel fuels. These products may be used as fuels and fuel components but also as chemical raw materials. The procedure was developed over the last few years at the Fraunhofer Institute for Environmental, Safety and Energy Technology UMSICHT in Oberhausen, Germany. In contrast to biodiesel, the product is chemically identical with fossil fuels to a large extent and may not only be used as fuel itself but also for enriching fuels ("designer fuel"). In 2011, the company was founded as a spin-off of the Fraunhofer Institute.
The Procedure
The greasoline® procedure enables the reprocessing of inferior fatty and oily waste materials to produce highest-grade biofuels. The materials used may be contaminated by fossil oils and contain unlimited amounts of free fatty acids and up to 10 weight percent of water. They are converted to the gas phase, enriched with water vapor as required and put over an activated carbon catalyst bed at around 450 to 500°C. The result is a mixture of fuel gases, CO, CO2, water and fuel vapor, from which the liquid fuel raw product is separated by means of cooling.
The Benefits
The technology addresses attractive, growing markets: The blending quota guidelines for gasoline and diesel fuels may be met without having to sacrifice the high quality of fossil fuels or having to provide new infrastructure. With biokerosene, airlines may save CO2 certificates, fulfill their commitment to climate-neutral growth and there are also advantages for end-customer marketing over established technologies using food-quality raw materials. The procedure may be implemented cost-efficiently in existing refinery infrastructure. Other related procedures to which it might be compared are procedures for catalytic cracking of fats and fat components. The benefits of the greasoline® procedure result from the specific combination of procedure characteristics such as standard pressure, heterogeneous gas solid matter catalysis, activated carbon catalyst and optional water vapor addition. Using activated carbon as a catalyst is significantly more cost-efficient than the catalysts used in alternative technologies. The low catalyst price is particularly advantageous in case of catalyst contamination or accelerated catalyst aging due to variations in raw material quality as common in waste material utilization. In contrast to the biodiesel procedure, greasoline® has the advantage that also waste flows may be used such as the waste material fraction of biodiesel production from waste edible fats or residues from palm oil biodiesel production as well as waste from the production of other vegetable oils that may not be used for food purposes. The procedure may also be used very successfully for the production of bio fuels from algae-derived oils. The pilot plant operated in Oberhausen serves for optimizing the production process for other raw materials and supports the procedure's implementation on a large industrial scale.
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