Integration of catalytic fast pyrolysis and hydroprocessing: a pathway to refinery intermediates and “drop-in” fuels from biomass

Abstract

Biocrude obtained from catalytic fast pyrolysis could be hydrotreated in a single-stage without preprocessing and stabilization steps.

In Situ Catalytic Fast Pyrolysis Using Red Mud Catalyst: Impact of Catalytic Fast Pyrolysis Temperature and Biomass Feedstocks

“…Specifically, biomass fast pyrolysis and hydrotreating of the produced bio-oil are a promising method for producing renewable chemical precursors and biofuel blendstocks. 6,7 However, the produced bio-oils show some challenging characteristics, including poor thermal and chemical stability, high oxygen and water content, high acidity, and corrosiveness, which cause severe catalyst deactivation and even reactor plugging during the hydrotreating process. 8,9 Therefore, stabilization and significant improvement of the quality of bio-oil are required in order to simplify the upgrading step.…”

Transportation fuels from biomass fast pyrolysis, catalytic hydrodeoxygenation, and catalytic fast hydropyrolysis

“…In this work, 18% carbon was lost to an aqueous phase, 50% was lost to char (8% as solid char and 42% as CO and CO2 from char combustion), 7% was lost to pyrolysis gasses, and 15% was unaccounted for. In contrast to the work of Mante et al [45,208], information on the pyrolysis oil yield, whether being from a catalytic process or not, is often not reported in upgrading studies, possible because this information has not been available when acquiring the bio-oil from external suppliers. It is our opinion that the oil yield, the energy content, and the degree of deoxygenation obtained in bio-oil upgrading studies should also be presented and discussed on the basis of the feed biomass, and we encourage researchers to do so to in future work.…”

“…cracking catalyst such as HZSM-5 [36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43], or with other materials such as red mud [44] and alumina based catalysts [45,46]. As this review deals with catalytic HDO and coupling of fast pyrolysis with HDO, catalytic pyrolysis with non-HDO catalysts and upgrading of pyrolysis oil with zeolites without hydrogen in the gas phase is outside the scope of this review.…”

“…In fact, several experiments were terminated due to coking and reactor plugging [200,206,207]. In most of the studies, where reactor plugging was not observed, carbon deposition on the catalyst was mentioned as a main source of deactivation [45,120,196,201,202,204,205,207]. Sheu et al [201] were not able to conduct an attempted experiment for HDO of pine bio-oil with a sulfided NiW/Al2O3 catalyst due to rapid reactor plugging.…”

“…However, rapid catalyst deactivation was observed, and after 11 h the degree of deoxygenation was down to 69%, the H/C ratio had decreased to 1.9, and the produced oil looked more similar to the feed. Mante et al [45] were able to obtain both a high oil yield of 64-82% and a high DOD of 60-94% by hydrotreating a loblolly pine oil. Note that they used a bio-oil obtained from catalytic fast pyrolysis rather than fast pyrolysis.…”