Innovative project to convert biomass from forestry waste into synthetic natural gas

The Environmental Research Group of the Carbochemistry Institute of the CSIC in Zaragoza is developing a project financed by the Government of Aragon with FEDER funds that studies the improved gasification of biomass from forestry cleaning waste. Aragón is one of the autonomous communities with the greatest development of the agroforestry sector, having more than 2.5 million hectares of forest area and 1.8 million hectares of cultivated land, which implies that the biomass generating potential for our community is one of the elders of Spain.

Biomass is considered a safe, renewable and neutral biofuel with respect to CO2 emissions into the atmosphere. Furthermore, as its generation is continuous and distributed, it contributes to settling the population in the territory. However, the current management of biomass is not optimized, losing a large amount of resources since, for example, there is no widespread cleaning of forests that prevents or minimizes the impact of forest fires, especially in summer, or waste management. agricultural, which causes a large part of them to be lost through burning, sometimes uncontrolled.

The objective of this project directed by researcher Ramón Murillo at the ICB-CSIC is to have a gas that can in turn be raw material for the production of synthetic natural gas that can be injected into the existing distribution network. Obtaining synthetic gas from biomass is a carbon-neutral technological process that is obtained from the gasification of forest residues to obtain a gas with a high methane content, similar to fossil fuel. In this way, this project contributes to taking advantage of native resources, reducing the risks of fires and reducing the carbon footprint of a fossil fuel such as natural gas.