Hydroprocessing of Biocrude into Hydrocarbon Liquid Fuel

Catalytic hydrotreating (HDT) of bio-oil offers a strategic opportunity to produce refinery feedstocks or infrastructure-compatible finished fuels. Nevertheless, HDT of raw bio-oil has proven to be challenging due to the complexity of the reactive oxygenated compounds; the thermal instability of the raw bio-oil cause issues such as reactor plugging and catalyst coking/deactivation. RTI is developing an advanced biofuels technology that integrates catalytic biomass pyrolysis and hydrotreating to produce hydrocarbon-based biofuels. The goal is to produce a more thermally stable bio-crude with lower oxygen content compared to typical bio-oils. Results from several HDT studies on bio-crude from RTI’s 1 ton per day catalytic biomass pyrolysis unit show promising results and suggest that the bio-crude oil can be successfully upgraded without a stabilization step.

The main goal of this work is to understand how bio-crude quality affects HDT by hydrotreating several well characterized bio-crude oils. The presentation will discuss in detail, the effect of biocrude composition and process condition (temperature, H₂ pressure, H₂/Oil ratio, and LHSV) on product yield/quality and hydrogen consumption. A detailed knowledge of the impact of these factors can result in innovative technology solutions to control reaction selectivity and minimize hydrogen demand.