Publishable summary: Industrial symbiosis (IS) solutions usually involve the transfer of any form of waste material and/or energy flows between stakeholders for valorisation and environmental impact reduction purposes. The success of the transaction may be influenced by several aspects, i.e., matching between offer and demand in terms of flow quality and amount, technical viability of waste incorporation into established and/or new industrial processes, economical savings in terms of raw materials consumption, incineration or landfilling costs for waste streams and detrimental legal and environmental restrictions for the emission of certain by-products, among others.
In this framework, D3.2 aims to provide methodologies for the technoeconomic assessment of IS projects as well as to establish guidelines for transactions pricing. This exercise is presented for the three lighthouses. The different nature of the IS solutions, namely new innovative production process in Escombreras, waste material flow exchange between various metal industry partners at different production scales in Brescia, and a new IS process design in Frövi for the inter-sectorial re-use of CO2 and energy flows, required the adoption of different approaches to assess on the pricing of such a transaction from a techno-economic point of view, i.e. excluding legal, environmental and further business and negotiation-related aspects. Specifically, a Material-Flow Cost Accounting (MFCA) methodology has been adopted to analyse the IS solution proposed for Escombreras and Frövi, whereas a reduction of waste approach was evaluated in the case of Brescia. The approach considered for the Spanish and Italian lighthouses tackles the estimation of the cost reduction ascribed to the proposed IS activities, comparing the pre- and post-Coralis situations. The approach for the Swedish demo is to find economic motivation to improve the symbiosis.
The MFCA methodology adopted for Escombreras site is complemented with a thermo-economic analysis based on exergy-loss along the current and proposed production processes, so as to quantify process irreversibilities, being independent from market and price fluctuations. For the Swedish demo, a prospective MFCA analysis is used to motivate improved resource efficiency of a future greenhouse simultaneously seeking both environmental as well as financial benefits. There is a further potential to use the same MFCA tool to assess future locations of the greenhouse concept.
In addition, TUPRAS contributes to this task providing a CO2 waste generation mapping within one of their industrial sites as well as a techno-economic evaluation of eventual IS and carbon capture, use and storage strategies (CCUS) to manage its abatement. A solution based on the use of the refinery waste CO2 flows for urea production in a neighbouring fertilizers production site is analysed. Sidenor evaluates the techno-economic viability of integrating waste heat from the steel production process via heat storage technologies. Analogously, EI-JKU performs a preliminary techno-economic evaluation of an IS solution involving the share of waste and renewable products among the Austrian industrial partners in Coralis (Borealis, Voestalpine).
The main outcome of this deliverable is a set of techno- and thermo-economic approaches to complement the traditional cost/benefit analysis based on CAPEX and OPEX and to establish guidelines on flow exchange pricing for a wide range of IS cases.