motto

"Biomass is forever" - David Hall

[in Sims R.E.H., The Brilliance of Bioenergy – In Business and in Practice, James and James (Science Publishers) Ltd, London, UK, 2001, 316 pages, ISBN 1-902916-28-X, link]

In the midst of a dramatic economic crisis, accentuated by increasing oil prices, decreasing oil reserves, growing energy consumption and threats to environment and climate, Europe has defined some very ambitious goals for the increase of the renewable energy consumption.

Among them, bioenergy from biomass is considered as an important non-fossil alternative.

In line with the European objectives, the current proposal aims for the exploitation of energy conversion processes applied on biomass from the local territory of the Province of Trento, for the best valorization of the raw material in terms of energy efficiency, costs and environmental impact.

For this, two fundamental aspects related to biomass use as fuel are:

     (1) to enlarge and improve the basic knowledge on biomass availability, composition and properties;

     (2) to apply this knowledge for the most advanced and environmentally safe utilization.

These may have potential industrial implications in the field of Technologies and processes for electrical and thermal energy generation, for future advanced and sustainable processing of biomass to biofuels and chemical feedstock, including collection, transportation, storage, upgrading, digestion, combustion, gasification, pyrolysis and liquefaction.