Waste2X
Biowaste valorisation coupled to Power-to-X
Upgrading biogas to grid quality means stripping out 35–45 vol% CO₂, a stream that is already captured, biogenic, and concentrated. Almost all of it is vented. Hydrogenating that CO₂ instead lifts a plant's methane output by roughly 60% from feedstock it already handles, without a single additional hectare of land.
- Host
- Technical University of Munich
- Funding
- Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship
- Role
- Project lead
- Period
- October 2026 – September 2028
Every pathway, held open at once
This is the project's own system schematic, drawn live. A superstructure keeps all candidate routes in play so that optimisation, not the engineer's prior, decides which ones a given case should build.
Every line is a pathway the optimiser may select. Hover or focus any unit to trace its full chain, upstream to the feedstock, downstream to the end use. Click to pin it.
- Electricity
- Feedstock & CO₂
- Hydrogen & fuels
- 01Supply
- Wind energy · Electricity
- Solar energy · Electricity
- Agricultural waste · Biomass
- Animal manure · Biomass
- 02Pre-conversion
- Electrolyzer · H₂ + O₂
- Air separation · N₂
- Anaerobic digestion · CH₄ + CO₂
- Gasification · Syngas
- 03Conversion
- Ammonia synthesis · NH₃
- Methanol synthesis · CH₃OH
- Methane synthesis · CH₄
- Power plant · Electricity + heat
- 04End use
- Livestock sector · Fertiliser, heat
- Residential sector · Heat, power
- Industry sectors · Feedstock, heat
- Transportation sector · Fuel
What the project sets out to answer
Waste2X integrates biowaste valorisation with Power-to-X to close the carbon loop on residues that are already being collected. Anaerobic digestion and gasification turn agricultural waste and manure into biogas and syngas; renewable electricity drives electrolysis; and the biogenic CO₂ that a conventional upgrading plant vents is instead hydrogenated into synthetic fuels. The project builds the plant-wide models, the optimisation and the techno-economic case that decide which of those pathways is worth building.
- 01
Model the whole system, not the unit
Plant-wide mass and energy balances across digestion, gasification, electrolysis and synthesis, at MW to GW scale, so the interactions between units are visible rather than assumed away.
- 02
Search the superstructure
Multi-objective optimisation over every candidate pathway at once, returning the trade-off front between cost, efficiency and carbon rather than a single point design.
- 03
Put biogenic CO₂ to work
Treat the digester's CO₂ as a feedstock rather than a waste, and quantify what that is worth against the cost of the hydrogen needed to convert it.
- 04
Test commercial viability
Techno-economic and exergoeconomic assessment under realistic price and policy scenarios, with the sensitivity ranking that shows which assumptions the case actually turns on.
- Units in the superstructure
- 16
- Candidate pathways
- 28
- Product routes
- 4
- More methane per tonne
- ~60%
Four stages, from feedstock to end use
Every link the optimiser may select
Hydrogen, methane, methanol, ammonia
From hydrogenating the CO₂ already separated
What it builds on
Waste2X is not a standing start. Each strand of it comes out of work already published or delivered.
- Allam cycle and Power-to-X integration (Ph.D., Aalborg University)
- CO₂ capture, compression and transport from biomass CHP
- Offshore infrastructure repurposing for renewable methane
- Superstructure optimisation of power-to-methanol with hybrid SOEC
Check the premise yourself
The claim that hydrogenating a digester’s waste CO₂ lifts gas output by roughly 60% is not rhetoric, it falls out of the biogas composition. The biowaste calculator runs that balance for any feedstock and throughput you like.
Open the calculator- Units in the superstructure
- 16
- Candidate pathways
- 28
- Conversion stages
- 4
Working on something adjacent?
Waste2X runs to 2028 and is open to industrial partners, data collaborations and co-supervised students.
Start a conversation