The development of innovative products from lignin, which comes as black liquor in a million-ton scale from pulp and paper production, has a huge potential to open new business areas. Despite significant efforts on national and international level, the vast majority of lignin is still subjected to incineration. Another societal challenge is a safe and sustainable supply with energy. While sustainable energy production has been addressed in the past years, sustainable energy storage still is an issue. Nowadays, most of the chemical storage technologies rely on depletable sources (e.g. metals), which need to be mined and transported to Europe, thereby causing a wide range of problems (e.g., disposal, sustainability, flammability etc.) In this project, a new value chain based on lignin (more precisely black liquor) is explored to generate sustainable, non‒inflammable redox flow battery electrolytes including aspects on recycling after end-of-life. For this purpose, processes will be designed to efficiently separate and pretreat the black liquor.
