The provision of high temperature heat for industry is one of the hardest to abate sectors in contemporary energy supply. Most commonly natural gas is used for its widespread availability, transportability and low price. However, this is linked with high emissions both in production and consumption. The project BioHEAT intends to present an alternative to provide a sustainable and carbon neutral energy carrier via advanced dual fluidised bed gasification (aDFB) of biomass and subsequent synthesis into synthetic natural gas (SNG). Two important aspects of the project were the selection of suitable biomasses and the evaluation of different process routes for optimal product quality and economic viability. The biomasses ought to both be available in sufficient quantities and exhibit satisfying chemical and physical properties for gasification whereas the examined potential process routes should produce high quality SNG with competitive production costs. At the start of the project, an extensive investigation of more than 25 fuel types was conducted, comparing chemical and physical properties, regionally available quantities and established utilisation routes. Focussing especially on the two countries of the project partners, Austria and Poland, two fuels, waste wood (WW) and corn cob (CC), were selected for experimental investigation in pilot scale at TU Wien. Both fuels represent biomass residues which resemble wood chips in elemental composition and thermal properties, with lower heating values of 18.4 MJ/kgdry for WW and 17.6 MJ/kgdry for CC respectively. Concerns regarding the poor ash melting behaviour of CC did not materialise in any operational difficulties during the gasification test run. The experimental data from pilot scale process chain test runs was used as the basis for the evaluation of different process routes, three of which were investigated in detail based on chemical efficiency and levelized cost of production: • A: Direct combustion of aDFB product gas • B: Fluidised bed methanation of aDFB product gas with gas conditioning via H2O-addition, upgrading via CO2-removal and fixed bed methanation polishing and drying • C: Fixed bed methanation of product gas with H2O-addition, CO2-removal and subsequent drying A comparison of process efficiencies, scaled to 100 MW biomass input power, shows that the overall efficiency (cold gas efficiency and district heating) of A is the highest with 83 % for both B reaches 67 % and 62 %, C amounts to 68 % and 63 % for WW and CC respectively. The lower efficiencies of B and C can be attributed to the losses during synthesis and energy consumption for gas conditioning. However, the product from B and C is grid quality SNG, which A does not provide. Hence, the product gas must be used locally. When comparing the levelized cost of production, A results in 38 and 51 €/MWh for WW and CC respectively. The costs for SNG from B and C lie at 81 and 96 €/MWh and 91 and 108 €/MWh for WW and CC respectively. Overall, due to significantly lower feedstock costs (20 €/t for WW, 70 €/t for CC), it is more economically feasible to produce high-quality SNG from WW.