Design and Assessment of Advanced Thermochemical Plants for Second Generation Biobutanol Production Considering Mixed Alcohols Synthesis Kinetics

Abstract

In prior work, the authors’ developed a novel process for producing second generation biobutanol through a thermochemical conversion route and mixed alcohols synthesis (MAS) process and showed that it was economically competitive to the biochemical route and to gasoline under certain market scenarios. However, the prior work made use of simplistic conversion models for the MAS reactor based on the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory future conversion targets for MAS catalysts. This work improves on the past work by replacing the simplistic MAS reactor model with a detailed kinetic model using a pilot-scale demonstrated catalyst leading to a more realistic representation of the process and enabling the impact of design parameters to be investigated for various novel process designs. Furthermore, economic and environmental metrics, such as the minimum butanol selling price (MBSP) and cost of CO2 equivalent emissions avoided (CCA), were used to assess the potential of all the process designs.