Biofuels and Bioenergy

A conventional refinery is based on mature processes that obtain standard products from a large variety of non- renewable feeds. Despite enormous benefits to modern civilization, the adopted production and consumption patterns paradoxically put us at environmental risk. Therefore it is mandatory a paradigm shift to decrease the carbon footprint without reducing the energy access to people. Biomass is composed of functionalized biopolymers (lignin-cellulose) based on sugars- and phenol-derivatives. On the other hand, refinery processes have been designed to operate on poorly reactive compounds like hydrocarbons. The bridge between these two remarkable worlds was archived in two steps: 1- by transforming the biomass into a bio-crude, which was produced by ketalyzation in acetone [1, 2] and acetylation reactions in acetic anhydride [3] under mild temperature conditions (around 1000C). This black bio-crude (density 1.0-1.3 gmL-1 and Typical CHO composition of 60, 8 and 32 respectively) is chemically distinct of any other bio-feed so far. 2- -The transformation of bio-crude and model compounds by the fluid catalytic cracking and hydrotreatment into monoaromatic and saturated hydrocarbons respectively [4]. Herein the results of the fluidized bed pilot plant in laboratory scale of both model test and bio-crude are presented. A representative ketal- derivative,1,2:5,6-di-O-isopropyliden-α-D-glucofuranose (DX) mixture up to 50% in n-hexane achieved three main goals: small coke formation, remarkable selectivity to hydrocarbons and slight improvement in n-hexane conversion as presented in Table1. Moreover, no oxygenated compounds were observed in the liquid phase, thus resulting in a drop-in fraction in the fuel pool.