(397d) The Effect of Wood Composition and Supercritical CO2 Extraction on Fast Pyrolysis Products

This work demonstrates that the integration of supercritical carbon dioxide extraction with fast pyrolysis is an effective method for the production of value-added chemicals and feedstock that is an attractive alternative to coal in energy sector. Integration of technologies is key for the development of holistic biorefineries that exploit all parts of the biomass feedstock and generate little or ideally no waste. In fact, the use of waste or low valued wood fractions is attractive due to their plentiful abundance and lack of exploitation. Supercritical carbon dioxide has been demonstrated to be effective at the removal of over half extractives from low quality wood and forestry waste, which can account for up to 11 wt.% of the dried biomass in waste needles. Importantly, the TOF-SIMS results showed that the composition of non-treated wood and samples after supercritical CO₂ extraction is different. However, supercritical carbon dioxide extraction had little impact neither on the physical properties of original wood nor on the product yields from fast pyrolysis in the wire mesh reactor. This indicates that extraction by supercritical carbon dioxide can be used as a method for adding further value to the process by removal of bio-based chemicals, whilst still maintaining the low yield of the solid fuel and high yield of hydrogen rich gas for the energy sector.