3.4. Comparison to other thermochemical pathways
This TEA shows higher MSP compared to the previous studies on thermochemical production pathways as shown in Table 5. This is mainly due to the relatively conservative assumptions on fuel yields and installation factor based on currently available supporting data. The fuel yield of bio-oil gasification pathway is 239 t d-1, which is about 20% less than low temperature biomass gasification pathway in Swanson et al. (2010). Fast pyrolysis and hydroprocessing pathway could achieve a fuel yield of 524 t d-1, which is more than twice of bio-oil gasification pathway. This low fuel yields reflects the current status of technology based on the experimental data. More technical and experimental data are needed to support the modeling parameters to highlight the advantage of bio-oil high pressure gasification pathway and syngas cleanup.
After adjusting the economic analysis to a consistent cost year 2013, the TCI of low temperature biomass gasification pathway is $560 million, which is $50 million higher than bio-oil gasification pathway. It is mainly because low temperature biomass gasification pathway includes a turbo-generator system which offset the increase of capital cost for fast pyrolysis process in bio-oil gasification pathway.