LIFE SUGAR Project: a new journey towards a CO2 lean glass industry

The acronym of the project stands for SUstainable Glass – Architecture of a furnace heat recovery system including a steam Reformer, and, as the title suggests, the project is focused on the development of an innovative embodiment of Steam Methane Reforming (SMR), to be implemented into an air-fuel fired soda-lime glass melting furnace, to enhance its energy efficiency with respect to conventional regenerative furnaces.

In particular, the innovative SUGAR module will exploit the residual heat of furnace flue gases to perform an endothermic steam methane reforming reaction, converting a part of the natural gas fuel input feed into H2-rich syn-gas, that will then be burned inside the melting furnace through a purposely designed combustion system.

This way, it will be possible to push the energy recovery from waste gases beyond the thermodynamic heat exchange limit of the regenerator system, reducing energy and fuel consumption, and therefore also reducing the CO2 emissions released into the atmosphere by the glass melting process.

This ambitious project will be developed by five partners: Stara Glass (the project coordinator), Stazione Sperimentale del Vetro, KT – Kinetics Tecnology, Johnson Matthey PLC and University of Genoa.

For more detailed information, please visit the project’s website:

https://www.lifesugarproject.com/