(84ar) Techno-Economic Assessment of Biomass to Valuable Pyrolyzed Hydrochar Via Hydrothermal Carbonization and Pyrolysis.

Recent studies have shown the pressing need for biochar for adsorbent technologies to mitigate the serious ongoing wastewater pollution. As traditional biochar synthesis yields adsorbent material with average adsorbing favorable properties, recent research has dived into varying advancements to improve the surface characteristics. The coupling of hydrothermal carbonization (HTC) with traditional pyrolysis has gained traction as a means to introduce attractive binding sites for target impurities without the need of involving chemical activators. This venture has provided high impurity uptake compared to existing adsorbent types further solidifying the demand for pyrolyzed hydrochar. However, limited research remains present on the economic feasibility of implementing hydrothermal carbonization and pyrolysis for the industrial production of pyrolyzed hydrochar from biomass. Therefore, this study proposes the plant scale production of pyrolyzed hydrochar aimed to convert 100 tonne/day corn stover biomass waste. Three different cases were investigated initiating varying pyrolysis temperatures (Cases I = 400 °C, Case II = 600 °C, Case 3 = 800 °C) as studies presented direct correlations between adsorbent quality to pyrolysis temperature. The industrial design which implements the two thermochemical conversion techniques were evaluated to calculate the total capital investment (TCI), manufacturing cost, return of investment (ROI) and breakeven selling price of the pyrolyzed hydrochar. Sensitivity analysis on all three cases were performed to distinguish which of the industrial parameters greatly impacted the breakeven selling price of the pyrolyzed hydrochar.