Techno-economic assessment of HTL integration to the Brazilian sugarcane industry: An evaluation of different scenarios

Abstract Hydrothermal liquefaction (HTL) has been identified as one of the most promising thermochemical technologies to produce liquid biofuels. Although the production cost of HTL biofuels has not yet reached a competitive price, Brazil is recognized worldwide by its mature and well-developed biomass chain, along with a very market-competitive sugarcane industry, which could be used to deploy HTL technologies in a large-scale. The present study carried out a techno-economic analysis to understand the economic performance of HTL in the Brazilian context and considered sugarcane bagasse as the feedstock in two main configurations: a HTL stand-alone facility and a HTL plant integrated with the Brazilian sugarcane industry. The integration of the HTL with a sugarcane ethanol distillery has significantly increased the internal rate of return (IRR) compared with the stand-alone, moving from 8.1%–12.6% per year, thus indicating that HTL have the potential of being economically feasible if integrated to a sugarcane mill. Moreover, the minimum fuel selling prices of biofuels (MFSP) produced in the best integrated scenario showed a very high market-competitiveness, estimated as 0.44, 0.48, 0.51 and 0.37 US$/L for gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, and marine fuel, which were slightly lower than fossil counterparts. This study has also demonstrated that the selection of liquefaction solvents is a highly sensitive parameter to the economic feasibility of HTL; water has showed the highest economic feasibility, suggesting that the utilization of ethanol as solvent may not be feasible at industrial scale.