Fast pyrolysis followed by hydrodeoxygenation upgrading is the most popular way to produce bio-oil from biomass. A two-step process can be combined together as hydropyrolysis treatment. This approach usually involves continuous hydrogen flow and high operation pressure (15~100 atm), resulting in significantly increased capital and operational costs. Compared to hydrogen, which is not naturally available and thus costly, methane can be readily obtained as natural gas. This work studies the technical feasibility of directly using methane as the reducing agent instead of hydrogen to remove oxygen from low cost carbon resources including low rank coal, organic municipal solid wastes, forestry wastes, and agricultural wastes while saturating the obtained liquid hydrocarbons at atmospheric pressure and moderate temperatures (400~500�C) under the facilitation of specially tailored catalyst, the produced upgraded synthetic oil will become more cost competitive. Moreover, methane itself will be converted to higher hydrocarbons beneficial for extra liquid fuel production along with lower carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from the upgrading process. By employing lignite coal, flex straw, and saw dust as low cost carbon resources to perform pyrolysis under natural gas over zeolite supported catalyst, we successfully collected upgraded crude oil with increased liquid yield and better quality in terms of reduced viscosity and total acid number (TAN), higher hydrogen to carbon (H/C) ratio, and much better physical appearance.The outcomes from this research will provide a more efficient and cleaner way to utilize low cost carbon resources and natural gas which are abundant in nature. Furthermore, the successful implementation of the study will be beneficial for the effective reduction of greenhouse gas emission and significant cost reduction of the current bio-oil production process making it more economically feasible.

Catalytic low cost carbon resources pyrolysis under natural gas for upgraded oil production

247th National Meeting (2014)

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