Muhaimin Iqbal
Author

BioLPG, How Much Does It Cost?

Advanced Renewable

Tue , 30 Apr 2024 23:42 WIB

The obstacles for people to migrate from fossil fuels to carbon neutral renewable fuels are generally on the price and supply side. Renewable fuels tend to be more expensive and the supply is not as massive as fossil fuels. What if we could solve these two problems at once, namely price and supply?

For BioLPG, it is very likely that these two problems can be overcome, with the current state of the art technology, it is possible to produce 1 kg of LPG with raw materials of no more than 2 kg of charcoal. Meanwhile, 1 kg of charcoal can be produced from approximately 3 kg of garbage or agricultural waste.

The only other consumables needed are water and electricity, but both are small. The bigger one is the catalyst, but it only needs to be replaced every 6 months or even 1 year depending on the type of catalyst. With data like this, 1 kg of BioLPG is feasible to be sold at a price of US$ 0.5/kg, or less than half the current commercial price of LPG which is around US$ 1.15/kg. This means that even without subsidies, the price of BioLPG is already affordable.

So what about the supply? Because the main raw materials are only charcoal or biomass plus water, BioLPG could be produced anywhere in the world because these materials will always be easy to obtain. There are no raw materials that need to be imported by any country, except perhaps catalysts.

What about the investment for the reactors? As an illustration, the BioLPG Microrefinery reactor, as shown in the picture below, is capable of processing 1 ton of charcoal with 550 kg of BioLPG product per hour. With a selling price of US$ 0.5/kg, a reactor like this can be built at a cost of no more than the selling value of BioLPG for 1 year of production.

Another value that could be very attractive from a financial perspective is the potential carbon credit from this BioLPG project. For every 1 kg of fossil LPG replaced with BioLPG, there will be around 3 kg of CO2 which becomes carbon-neutral, that is, the CO2 resulting from burning BioLPG is offset by the photosynthesis process when the biomass used as raw material grows.

Now, who wants to try or start first? our team from the Advance Renewable Organization (ARO) is ready to provide a detailed explanation, as well as prepare implementation projects for people all over the world. ARO is prepared to help countries in the world, especially in achieving SDG number 7, feel free to discuss with us.

ARO team will also be at the 10th International Conference on Renewable Energy Gas Technology (REGATEC 2024), Lund - Sweden, 15-16 May 2024. For those who will attend the conference, we can arrange meeting there.