A review of potential innovations for production, conditioning and utilization of biogas with multiple-criteria assessment

Biogas is a relatively mature renewable energy technology but still most commercial biogas power plants require significant financial incentives. Additionally, local shortages of very cheap digestible feedstocks limit biogas productivity, especially for larger biogas power plants (>1 MWe). Innovations that could improve cost-effectiveness and resource efficiency of biogas energy technology are therefore required. Over the last few years a number of potential process innovations for biogas technology have been proposed and investigated. However, the majority of these novel concepts has minimal or no impact on technology development. Disruptive innovations are very rare, but only they really matter for the economy. Therefore review reports that sytematically compare, analyze and evaluate the suitability of these emerging methods with emphasis on technological excellence and realistic commercial potential are needed. This study presents potential process innovations from most recent patent and academic literature proposed for biogas (i) production, (ii) conditioning, (iii) utilizatiori and (iv) industrial symbiosis. Within these four highly interdisciplinary categories the review attempts to provide short practical comments on selected methods and briefly analyzes their perspectives and constraints. Further, relevant biogas process innovation criteria are designed and multiple-criteria assessment of pre-selected potential process innovations is made. The paper concludes with the characterization of innovativeness of selected solutions and suggests future research needs for biogas energy technology that could bring new innovations in near term. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.