Breakthrough in the search for high quality fuels from inexpensive biomass

PA 331/10 Chemical engineering experts at The University of Nottingham have helped a team of international researchers find a way of producing inexpensive renewable liquid fuel out of low grade oils made from renewable products such as farm waste and wood chips. The process, using a unique integrated catalytic process, could open the door to a chemical industry based on renewable biomass feedstock. Dwindling petroleum resources combined with economic, environmental and political concerns about the petroleum-based economy in which we live makes it imperative to develop new processes for the production of renewable fuel and chemicals. The research, led by the University of Massachusetts-Amherst (UMASS) in collaboration with experts at Southeast University, Nanjing in China and Nottingham, and published , demonstrates how cheap renewable pyrolysis oil, bio-oils produced from biomass, can be upgraded into high commodity chemicals such as mono-alcohols, diols, light olefins and aromatic hydrocarbons — which are used in the production of plastics. Because of their oxygen content these bio-oils have not been of high enough quality to use in the production of synthetic fuels so far. Now the team of scientists have converted the bio-oils into 11 different biomass-derived feedstocks using a de-oxygenation process which makes them more compatible with current fuels and chemical crude oil refinery settings.