Hydrogenation of Bio-Oil Model Compounds over Raney-Ni at Ambient Pressure

Bogdan Shumeiko,David Kubička,Klaus Schlackl

doi:10.3390/catal9030268

Bogdan Shumeiko, David Kubička + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/catal9030268

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Abstract

Lignocellulosic biofuels are the most promising sustainable fuels that can be added to the crude oil pool to refill the dwindling fossil resources. In this work, we tested a Raney-Ni catalyst for the hydrogenation of four bio-oil model compounds and their binary mixtures to assess their reactivity under mild conditions suitable for bio-oil stabilization preceding green diesel production from lignocellulosic biomass. The hydrogenation experiments were performed at ambient hydrogen pressure at temperatures in the range 30–70 °C. Raney-Ni was found to hydrogenate all investigated model compounds efficiently; both carbonyl groups and double bonds were saturated. In addition, it was also active in the demethoxylation of guaiacol. When studying the binary mixtures, furfuryl alcohol was found to significantly inhibit the hydrogenation of the other model compounds (guaiacol and methyl isobutyl ketone) due to their very strong adsorption.

Highlights

Green diesel production has been developing rapidly over the past decade, and the annual capacity of the commercial units has exceeded 2 million tons thanks to the NexBTL and Ecofining technologies [1,2]
We present the results of the hydrogenation tests using model compound mixtures to explore the possible inhibition or promotion effects of different functional groups
Based on the product distribution, it can be concluded that guaiacol underwent demethoxylation and hydrogenation, yielding cyclohexanol as the main reaction product, which is consistent with the results obtained by Wang et al [29] for the guaiacol hydrogenation, they obtained higher guaiacol conversion (100%)

Summary

Introduction

Green diesel production has been developing rapidly over the past decade, and the annual capacity of the commercial units has exceeded 2 million tons thanks to the NexBTL and Ecofining technologies [1,2]. Both technologies use vegetable oils and animal fats (including waste oils and fats) as feedstock, which presents a significant limitation for their further growth due to the restricted availability of these feedstocks. Fast pyrolysis is one of the thermochemical conversion technologies of lignocellulosic biomass It affords a liquid biofuel intermediate called bio-oil [4]. Catalytic hydrogenation over a wide range of metallic catalysts (e.g., sulphided, transition, and noble metals) has great potential for upgrading and refining bio-oil to produce high-quality and cost-competitive substitutes of petroleum fuels [5,6,7]

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Results

Conclusion