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Economic Tools and Roadmaps for Widespread Deployment of Hydrothermal Liquefaction

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Our current response to climate change has been through broad-spectrum electrification, as seen in electric vehicles, through the use of energy storage technology. However, to enable the long-distance travel required for freighting and aviation, the energy density of hydrocarbon fuels has yet to be beaten. We can leverage the 22 million metric tons of food and municipal waste produced by the United States every year to produce renewable, low carbon intensity biofuels using hydrothermal liquefaction (HTL). With relative maturity on the benchtop, dozens of economic analyses have been performed to elucidate HTL's viability. These economic analyses assume case-by-case plant design solutions, which are time and resource intensive. This talk will present a tool developed to drastically shorten this economic viability screening time using only the results of a single experiment, and then discuss how HTL's omnivorous nature can be leveraged to modularize plant design and observe fuel cost reductions by learning from repeated standardized deployment.

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  • etd-63466
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  • 2022
Date created
  • 2022-04-25
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  • 2023-12-05

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Permanent link to this page: https://digital.wpi.edu/show/pv63g336v