Project partners VITO and ifeu (Institute for Energy and Environmental Research Heidelberg) have submitted an interim deliverable, focusing on the environmental and economic aspects of the COUNTLESS project. The aim was to provide early guidance to the partners involved in process and application development.
As the deliverable contains sensitive data, this article will focus on the methodology and impact of the work.
In the interim deliverable VITO and ifeu provide the settings and system descriptions for the parallel analysis of environmental and economic aspects of the COUNTLESS project. These analyses will later feed into a holistic integrated sustainability assessment. This includes the definitions of system boundaries, outlining methodological approaches and an initial description of processes and scenarios. It establishes a structured foundation for the more detailed sustainability assessments that will be performed later in the project.
Additionally, initial insights from the early assessment of the environmental sustainability and profitability potential of the COUNTLESS lignin valorisation value chain are presented to inform key development choices regarding process optimization and application selection. To this end, an early qualitative assessment of current and emerging market opportunities and environmental sustainability levers of the product applications studied in this project was carried out. This assessment combines primary insights obtained through interviews with product developers with secondary data sources. Moreover, preliminary quantitative results from the techno-economic assessment (TEA) and a greenhouse gas balance of the core process are described as far as data is already available, which were obtained using a simplified methodology and approach.
General approach, system and methodological settings
The COUNTLESS project is accompanied by a comprehensive sustainability assessment including environmental, economic, social as well as regulatory and safety aspects. The participatory approach is used to ensure that the assessment provides insights that are really useful for the project partners and can be translated into concrete actions.
As a first step, all partners met in a several hour workshop on value chain definition and settings for the sustainability assessment. As part of this workshop, several goal questions had been identified which will guide the sustainability assessment. All this information has been processed by two project partners. IFEU is responsible for managing and integrating the overall sustainability assessment, the LCA, the social LCA and the safety assessment, while VITO is responsible for process modelling and TEA. Taken together, their work will yield common settings, scenarios and preliminary process models for the sustainability assessment.
The quantitative sustainability assessment follows a cradle-to-grave approach, modelling the COUNTLESS process as an industrial-scale technology by 2035, with a significant capacity for lignin conversion per year. Process flow diagrams (PFDs), compiled with input from all consortium partners, reflect current process configurations and guide preliminary mass and energy flow modelling.
Strategic relevance and recommendations
Early sustainability assessments highlight both the strategic relevance and key bottlenecks for lignin valorisation. The insights generated in this task have already informed concrete actions in the ongoing development of the core process and support the further development of product applications.