Irati Garcia has recently been in Vancouver at the University of British Columbia (UBC) working in Prof. Bi’s research group from UBC thanks to the BIOMASS-CCU project. She has obtained safety training at UBC and participated in the start-up and preliminary tests of the microwave pilot reactor, carried out several tests under different conditions using microwave heating and also investigated the amounts of CaO. She has also exchanged scientific knowledge with the group of Professor Bi’s, and carried out data analysis and materials characterisations and also a few collaborated papers are being prepared.

Leire, a PhD student from UPV/EHU visited Professor Bi’s group at UBC from July 2022. She has done the preparation of the biomass samples to be fed into the gasifier, runs and analysis of the results. The gasification plant consisted of three stages: biomass gasification, syngas treatment and methanation. As mentioned above, a double bed unit was used for the gasification stage, since this configuration promotes heat and mass transfer. In these units, steam reacts with the biomass (in this case sawdust) in the gasification reactor, producing syngas and char. The char and the circulating bed material (in this case sand) pass into the char combustion chamber, where the temperature rises due to the exothermicity of the process. The hot solids leaving the combustion chamber return to the gasifier to provide heat to the gasification process. In this way, high carbon conversion and high syngas quality are obtained. The syngas from the gasification reactor and the flue gas from the combustion chamber are treated in separate gas cleaning trains. The operational complexity of large plants is well known. Accordingly, natural gas is first used to reach the reaction temperature and then air and biomass are introduced to reach the final reaction temperature by combustion. In the syngas cleaning stage, contaminants such as HCl, H₂S, tar, particulates, etc., are removed. The methanation stage consists of one reactor for the WGS (Water Gas Shift) reaction and two reactors for the methanation reaction.

Dr Gartzen Lopez from University of the Basque Country visited University of British Columbia, Canada, to exchange knowledge related to biomass gasification and low-carbon technologies.

CCST2022 has been successfully organised including 31 plenary and keynote presentations, 18 invited talked and more than 60 oral presentations. Interesting topics from world-leading researchers were presented and discussed. We thank all members of organisation committee, all speakers, chairs and participants for their contribution. Some nice pictures are attached below:

The BIOMASS-CCU coordinator is organising a CCST2022 conference, which is supported by the RISE project. The conference will focus on the discussion of carbon capture related science and technologies. It is free registration and a few awards will be presented.

More details could be found at: http://www.ccst2022.com.