Kawasaki Heavy Industries, Ltd. has successfully developed a power generation system using woodchips from lumber mills and wood thinned out of plantations. The company claims that this is the first system in the world that can deal with small quantities of wood biomass, on the order of several tons per day.

When burned, ligneous biomass emits the same amount of CO2 that the plant absorbed through photosynthesis in order to grow. Thus, the total volume of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the air is equalized. This is called a carbon-neutral property, and has led to high hopes for the expanded use of wood biomass as a clean energy resource to fight global warming. The difficulty for this technology lies in collection and transportation of large volumes of resources. Thus, Kawasaki's new technology is a long-awaited success in the development of small yet highly efficient wood biomass energy conversion.

In this power generation system, a pressurized fluidized bed gasifier converts ligneous biomass into a gas that contains a large volume of tar. This is introduced into a combustion chamber as it is, and burned to generate electricity using a gas turbine. The new system is about three times as efficient (approx. 20 percent efficiency) as a directly-fired steam turbine power generation system on a similar scale.

Development of the system was launched in fiscal 2001 as an R&D project scheduled for completion by the end of March 2005. A practical test aiming for 150 kilowatts of output is planned at a newly built pilot plant at a sawmill in Kochi Prefecture, Shikoku, western Japan sometime after April 2005.



Posted: 2005/04/14 09:13:13 AM
Japanese version

TAG Ecosystem , Energy , Manufacturing industry , Technology