SOLUTIONS
Technological innovations are one of the main pillars of CORALIS, although it will be complemented by the managerial and economical perspective of IS, which altogether will provide the Industrial Symbiosis readiness level and, thus, the overall feasibility of the IS solution
CORALIS will address the improvement of existing IT tools developed in Europe to enhance the operation of Industrial Symbiosis Systems. Comparing to actual IT tools, the Virtual Assessment Platform aims to cover the gap of management a symbiosis activity from an operational perspective.
The starting point is the identification of IS opportunities, however, further efforts are still needed to ensure the IS implementation in a real industry environment.
Therefore, the Virtual Assessment Platform will represent a follow-up progress based on the management and operation of a real industrial symbiosis system. CORALIS will tackle this limitation by promoting the implementation of real IS cases in the IT tool keeping in mind the forthcoming progress towards a Circular Economy.
Fertiberia produces KNO3 in Escombreras following a process based on ammonia nitrate and Potassium Chloride as raw materials. This process is high consumer of electricity and water, what is of high impact in the area. Fertiberia has developed a novel process based on Ion Exchange which solves the problems of high-water consumption, low product and by-product concentrations and high energy consumption for crystallization.
The process is based on mobile ion exchange resins and do not use water in their regeneration. The normality of the ion solutions used does not change during the process, what makes it more stable, extending also the life of resins utilized.
The concentration of by-product and product is high what allows to crystallize at ambient temperature, reducing drastically energy consumption.
The by-product HCl will be concentrated to commercial grade and reused in the facility. In the Coralis project, a pilot plant will be installed for the HCl concentration and reuse, using CaCl2 as an intermediate product. All by-products will be reused in the facility and the Fertiberia Group, improving the area impacts in wastewater, raw materials and energy and reducing CO2 emissions.
The demonstrator will showcase the combination of existing technologies for use in CCU. Heat is a substantial part of the operating cost, so this interdependency between CO2-separation and heat is an interesting opportunity for the combined system.
Thus, a key design feature in the combined system will be based on the integration between the two, either by driving the separation with waste heat, or recovering waste heat from CO2 separation.
The integration will be applied both to water vapour condensation and to gas separation, whether by absorption or membrane. Once the CCU for the greenhouse is established, the project actors and others can develop other CO2 uses on the same platform.
Opportunities have been identified for algae farming or fuel production. Lastly, because emission sources and sinks will not always be in proximity, the CO2 could be liquified and distributed elsewhere.
Interest of such an arrangement have also already been identified. For all these uses, it is a question of cost. The demonstrator will design, construct and operate a complete system, thus achieving TRL 7.
The demonstrator will progress on application of the different units devoted to the transformation of the industrial resides and by the integration and adaptation of the standard processes to the use of alternative raw materials produced.
Due to the high heterogeneity of the industrial waste it is mandatory to move from lab-scale prototype to industrial scale. Lab-scale as well as pilot prototypes for waste recovery are already available.
The innovation of this demonstrator is that all the new installed units: pyrolysis plant, SiO2 separation, reducing furnace, briquetting and char injector will be designed, built and directly testing into the daily routine fully reaching the TRL7.
The industrial application of all these technologies, the specific use of them together with the possibility to exchange of alternative raw materials produced, represent the progress beyond the state-of-the-art of foreseen achievements for this demonstrator.
CORALIS project will develop a 3-pillar methodology process composed by TRL, EMR and MRL to cover technology, economics and managerial issues at the same time in all the activities of the project.
To this end, brokerage tools and support mechanisms for the CORALIS demo cases will be developed, to enable working across the limits of individual companies, embracing whole value chains across sectors.
Extensive collaboration with the industries will be implemented to foster the implementation of cases and demonstration projects through networking with and exchange of best practices activities.
CORALIS will thoroughly analyse the specific material flows, strengths and weaknesses, develop business cases and models for each IS case involved in the project, connecting local stakeholders (process industries, other sectors, public sector, civil society and finance) at early stage of the project and in the implementation of future actions.
Based on the analysis mentioned, the development of IS business strategy towards symbiosis and circularity, incl. the CO2 abatement and climate neutrality goals in the case of the CORALIS followers demo cases will be created and implemented.
Also, CORALIS will provide the demo cases with the tools and support to establish management and brokerage structures or development of existing structures to incubate the methodologies towards IS design.
Also, mitigation measures to the implementation of actions will be developed within the regions and across regions All in all, adapted to the nature of such structures needs, to be individual – best addressing the needs and peculiarity of each CORALIS demo cases.
CORALIS will develop integrated management systems to be used by the demo cases of the project and by a larger number of non-CORALIS sectors, for both, the duration of the project and beyond.
Business models will be co-developed in the case of the CORALIS followers´ demo cases. Interorganisational management processes, agreements and (co)investment and ownership frameworks will be analysed in detail.
Particular attention will be paid to the role and dynamics of funding by the regional authorities or other needed instruments (e.g. infrastructure and industrial infrastructure funding) and industrial or other private investments. All the information collected will result in a comprehensive handbook of good practices to inspire the IS of the future.
CORALIS will implement Life Cycle Assessments to assess overall CO2 impact including all elements which could play a role in improving the environmental performance of the new CORALIS solutions to test and deploy.
Also, CORALIS will develop a harmonised accountability system (cradle-to-gate) to feed into the demo cases of the project and will improve it and validate it as general recommendations at the end of the project as part of the Handbook. CORALIS will develop training material to contribute to new ways of cooperation with systems for vocational education and training (VET).
It will consider the up-taking industry skills and qualification demands. Additionally, CORALIS will explore and set up a dialogue with regional stakeholders from policy, economy, civil society and science setting up a regional ecosystem to define the needs in each CORALIS demo case.
CORALIS will also benefit from the EU funded ERASMUS+ project “Skills Alliance on Industrial Symbiosis (SPIRE-SAIS)”, represented by several partners of CORALIS in this on-going initiative.