Provisional title: Digitalisation, industrialisation and optimal production of biomethanol.

The global shipping sector is almost entirely dependent on fossil fuels for its operations and uses 400 million litres of fossil fuels per year. The aviation sector uses about 300mn tonnes of aviation fuel annually. Both industries are taking a proactive role in moving away from fossil fuel dependency and towards carbon-neutral fuel sources that are carbon neutral, and with a goal of lowering CO2 emissions. Biomethanol has many positive characteristics as a biofuel: energy density, physical safety, storable, compatible with internal combustion and fuel cell engines, and serves as a feedstock for jet engine kerosene. The Eurostars partners have the industrial infrastructure for converting forest waste biomass and aquaculture waste into biomethanol via gasification, followed by gas scrubbing and conditioning, and finally synthesis of methanol. We now want to develop a software and data tools and a digital twin for the automated production of these biomass materials with our industrial infrastructure, and for collecting key data from our entire upstream/downstream value chain to be able to calculate the full environmental benefit and CO2 emissions reductions. The various software tools will be fully integrated with the industrial infrastructure, and will be be a replicable system that can be constructed at new locations wherever sufficient biomass can be sourced to maintain operations, and with minimal needs for major industrial redesign or control software development. It will have flexibility and adaptability in its design. The digital twin will permit operators to simulate each step in production to optimise its productivity, resource use or CO2 emissions, and ultimately it will be compatible with a very wide range of agricultural waste biomass materials.