Project details

The REF4FU project, in collaboration with five researchers and six industry partners, aims to develop, validate, and evaluate sustainable refinery concepts that can meet the future demand for liquid fuels based on sustainable feedstocks. Green methanol, Fischer-Tropsch hydrocarbons, and pyrolysis oil are to be used to produce, test, and evaluate fuels for road, air, and ship transport that are common today and are likely to be required in the future. The technologies required for this should be verified to at least TRL 5.

The resulting refinery concepts will be evaluated in terms of technical, environmental, and economic characteristics, and their flexibility for future fuel requirements will be determined, as well as possible synergy and optimization potentials. Finally, an overall assessment is carried out against the background of the regulatory framework and the feasibility of the developed refinery concepts. The results of the analyses and models are intended to demonstrate the potential of synthetic, green fuels. To this end, the system must first be implemented and tested on a pilot plant scale. In addition, the cost and profitability analysis results will be used to support the decision-making process regarding optimizing the system constellations, the usefulness of the planned synergies, and the profitability of the overall concept.

The developed supply concepts and the calculated greenhouse gas reduction potentials represent scientifically the possible contribution of synthetic fuels/biogenic fuels in sustainable road, aviation and shipping. In work package 4, a techno-economic and ecological assessment of the fuels will be carried out. The thesis focuses on flow diagram simulation, economic evaluation, and the derivation of synergy and optimization potentials.

Figure 1: Diagram of the planned process network. Fuel fractions are generated from the feedstock shown on the left by the process stages marked in yellow and then further processed into different types of fuels.

Figure 2: Examples of Applied Methods

Further information can be found on the project website:

re4fu