Project Brief

The scope of work was to develop a front end design and budget for a biorefinery process. The biosciences company has developed a refinery process to valorise fresh waste in house and required a feasibility assessment of a fully scaled up commercial operation of this process.

The scope of supply included the following:

• Feasibility assessment
• Equipment sizing
• CAPEX estimate
• OPEX estimate
• Masterplan to scale up and sequentially introduce products

The Solution

The biorefinery process was developed in house by the client and a high level process flow and mass balance was provided to FDT.

A part of design development, FDT completed mass and energy balances and timing analyses for each step of the process.

The output of the study included:

• Detailed capital cost estimate
• Detailed operating cost estimate
• Energy efficiency commentary
• Process safety commentary
• Refinery process and system design description
• Outline project schedule
• Analysis of the impact of selection of various processing e.g. the positives and negatives associated with different drying and filtration technologies.