Hydrothermal carbonization of wet biomass from nitrogen and phosphorus approach: A review

C.I. Aragón-Briceño, A.K. Pozarlik, E.A. Bramer, Lukasz Niedzwiecki, H. Pawlak-Kruczek and G. Brem

Renewable Energy, 2021, vol. 171, issue C, 401-415

Abstract: With increasing energy and resource consumption due to population growth, the biorefinery concept is becoming popular. This concept aims to harness all the properties of biomass by producing energy and recovering useful chemical products. Nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus play a key role in the world’s food production because they are the main elements used in fertilizer production. Hydrothermal carbonization (HTC) has been presented as a suitable option for energy recovery that can also be used as a pre-treatment for enhanced nutrient recovery. During the HTC process, part of the nitrogen and phosphorus are solubilized into the process water and the other part remains within the hydrochar. Hydrochars are mainly used as soil amendments due to their high content of phosphorus and nitrogen, but in this process, water still contains a considerable concentration of these compounds making it a potential source for their recovery. Therefore, HTC may boost the nutrient recovery strategy by extraction (process water) or densification (hydrochar) from biomass if it is coupled with another nutrient recovery process. This review presents an overview of the phosphorus and nitrogen fate during the HTC process from a perspective of nutrient recovery, presenting existing technologies and future trends.

Keywords: Hydrothermal carbonization; Nitrogen recovery; Phosphorus recovery; Biomass; Nutrient recovery (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960148121002883
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:renene:v:171:y:2021:i:c:p:401-415

DOI: 10.1016/j.renene.2021.02.109

Access Statistics for this article

Renewable Energy is currently edited by Soteris A. Kalogirou and Paul Christodoulides

More articles in Renewable Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().