Chinese Chemists Report the Upgrading of Biooils.

[NNadir]

Biomass, despite containing a low carbon content, is clean, because biomass has a negligible content of sulfur, nitrogen, and ash, which gives a lower emission of SO2, NOx, and soot than that of conventional fossil fuels. Besides, zero emission of CO2 can be achieved because CO2 released from biomass will be resolved into the plants by photosynthesis quantitatively. Biomass fast pyrolysis for bio-oil production has aroused great attention and interest extensively in recent years for the excess consumption of fossil fuels and high efficiency of the biomass pyrolysis technique. Energy crisis and fuel tension make the biomass fast pyrolysis a more important area of research.1,2 Biooil from biomass fast pyrolysis is mainly produced from biomass residues in the absence of air, atmospheric pressure, a low temperature (450-550 °C), high heating rate (103-104 °C/s), and short gas residence time, to crack into short-chain molecules and be cooled to liquid rapidly. However, bio-oil has deleterious properties of high viscosity, thermal instability, corrosiveness, and chemical complexity, which set up many obstacles to their applications. The recent upgrading techniques are hydrodeoxygenation, 3-53-5 catalytic cracking of pyrolysis vapors,66emulsification,7-97-9 steam reforming,1010 extracting chemicals from the bio-oils, etc. In this paper, solid acid and solid base catalysts were prepared and compared with upgrading the biooil
properties by catalytic esterification and the mechanism involved in it was investigated...

This article is from Energy & Fuels 2006, 20, 2717-2720

The oils obtained are described as having longer stability than other oils obtained in traditional settings.