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So far, Huber has developed two generations of a reactor in the lab. In tests, the group starts with sawdust waste from a local mill. The ground-up biomass is fed into a fluidized bed reactor. Inside, a powdered solid catalyst swirls around in a mixture of gas heated to about 600 ºC. When wood enters the chamber, it rapidly breaks down, or pyrolyzes, into small unstable hydrocarbon molecules that diffuse into the pores of the catalyst particles. Inside the catalyst, the molecules are reformed to create a mixture of aromatic chemicals. The reaction process takes just under two minutes.
The company would not disclose details about the catalyst, but Huber says one of its most important properties is the size of its pores. "If the pores are too big, they get clogged with coke, and if they're too small, the reactants can't fit in," says Huber. The company's catalyst is a porous silicon and aluminum structure based on ZSM-5, a zeolite catalyst developed by Mobil Oil in 1975 and widely used in the petroleum refining industry. Sudolsky says that it can be made cheaply by contractors. Anellotech's reactors are very similar to those used to refine petroleum. But the company's reactors are designed to ensure rapid heat transfer and fluid dynamics that ensure that the reactants enter a catalyst before they turn into coke.
Stefan Czernik, a senior scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's National Bioenergy Center in Golden, CO, cautions that the process has so far only been demonstrated on a small scale, and the complexity of these reactors could mean a long road ahead for scaling them up. "It is not easy to replicate at a large scale the relationship between the chemical reaction and heat transfer as it's done in the laboratory," he says.
After demonstrating the process at a pilot plant next year, Anellotech hopes to partner with a chemical company to build a commercial scale facility in 2014. Sudolsky says the company will either license the catalytic pyrolysis process to other companies or build plants distributed near biomass sources, since transporting biomass is not economically viable.
Newly engineered E. coli streamline the conversion of cellulose into fuel.
Let's take good ol' wood and turn it into some of the most dangerous chemicals we can think of. Benzene, toluene, and xylenes? Why not put our friends up at Connecticut Yankee in charge of this deal, I hear they're running low on cesium. Let's put some DIY kits in Make magazine too.
The only good product of this reaction is the coke, it would make a great soil amendment. In a perfect world it would be too valuable to burn for fuel. We might need it to cleanse our biosphere from the other pollutants soon.
Guest (OtherDoug)
The chemicals referenced are basic feedstock items for most of the synthetic materials used by our society: solvents, adhesives, resins, nylon, polyurethane, polystyrene and carbon nanotubes. If we can use a process like this to make those materials from biomass instead of petroleum I think we'll be making a significant leap towards a sustainable economy.
Your only good point here is that the production of coke would be helpful as a soil amendment and as a carbon sink. If it is combined with organic material you could use it for terra preta.
there's a possibly prophetic sci-fi short story:
an interstellar survey expedition out from earth returns from a 20 year trip for them, stretched by near light speeds to 200+ years local time.
They find the atmosphere filled with hydrocarbon smog and most larger life forms dead.
They want to find the cause so they land, finding signs of desperation and struggles. They find monuments to a person all over the globe. Oddly this person was first revered as a hero but near the end the statues were torn down. Turns out this person had found a near perfect way to convert biomass to food and fuel.
Solved the problem, so humanity kept growing and using all available biomass as food / fuel, till nothing was left and the ecosystem decayed to stinking mess, and they realized what he had enabled near the end.
Certainly biomass is better than fossil fuels for some reasons but it can't be our only energy source.
There's evidence now that mass sugarcane production in brazil is now displacing other farmers such as soy who are starting to encroach on the amazon for example.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/04/09/the_dirty_underside_of_lulas_clean_energy_revolution?page=full
I continue to see Huber articles trying to make it sound like using ZSM-5 to make BTX from biomass is new. There are papers from as early as 1979 (from ZSM-5 inventors) talking about this. A lot of work at NREL, Prof. Williams (UK), and Prof. Bakshi (Canada), Prof. Vasalos (Greece). Long story short - this is a lot of hype, but nothing new in this chemistry. No idea if reactor is novel, but this looks like greenwash to me - lots of hype, but like a lot of "new" energy ideas, already long ago invented in first energy crisis. Getting chemistry to work at small scale is easy (and not new) - building plants and making money with it is a lot tougher.
Commercialization of Biomass Pyrolysis
There is an interesting company that is based in Ottawa, Ontario Canada, called Ensyn Technologies Inc. http://www.ensyn.com. Ensyn was incorporated in 1984 to commercialize its proprietary biomass-to-liquid technology, known as Rapid Thermal Process (RTP). It is a short residence time, pyrolysis process that reaches 500ºC, followed by rapid cooling. The company reports a yield for RTP of about 75% by weight (liquid “bio-oil” from residual forestry or agricultural biomass).
Ensyn has designed, built, and commissioned seven commercial plants in the United States and Canada, the largest of which has a capacity of 100 tonnes (feedstock) per day. Ensyn's current projects are for plants with 5-10 times this capacity. Outputs from plants using Ensyn’s RTP process are used in the manufacture of more than 30 chemical and fuel products.
I'm not familiar with Coskata; however, my understanding of the Ensyn process is that feedstock is heated by mixing it in tubular reactors with pre-heated sand. The mix of feedstock and sand moves very rapidly through the reactor. Ensyn's literature uses the word "tornado" to describe the flow within the reactor. Residence time is a couple of seconds. Upon exiting the reactor tube, the sand is separated from the reactant mixture and reheated/recycled back. The sand is heated using combustible outputs from the reaction itself. As far as I know, there is no use of a plasma torch.
The technology was developed at the University of Western Ontario by the company's founders: Dr. Robert Graham and Barry Freel, and is patented.
Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That's bad news not just for the country's economy but for the future of innovation.
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epcotint
3 Comments
From Biomass to Chemicals in One Step
Hello Katherine:
In your biomass to chemicals article, you suggest yield of 40%. This number according to my calculation is about twice what it should be. The rationale is as follows. Let us assume that the density of the chemical liquid is 10 pounds per gallon. This would mean that we have 500 pounds of liquid. With one metric tone i.e. 2200 pounds as the feed, the yield would be =22.72% (500/2200). If the yield is about 23% the process needs LOT OF HELP. Converting to aromatics is good but I need to see more data.
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DaveD
16 Comments
Re: From Biomass to Chemicals in One Step
That is a very heavy liquid if you assume 10 lbs per gallon. Water weighs only 8.3lbs/gallon and gas is less than 6.5lbs/gallon.
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GaryB
119 Comments
Re: From Biomass to Chemicals in One Step
with a yield of 40 percent. The other products of the reaction include coke, used to fuel the reactor [snip] On average, lignin accounts for 40 percent of the energy stored in whole biomass.
This is really ambiguous. 40% is lignin ... and the yeild of that is 40% for 16% yield from the biomass?
Also, how much energy is used here? The wood has to be transported to a site, then ground to dust, then heated to 600 degrees (presumably by burning the coke). One simple way of thinking about the question is: Could you construct a truck, that would run this process to produce enough Gas to haul the wood X number of miles leaving Y% of the wood left. That would tell you something about the actual yield.
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