(434a) Aromatic Ring Opening of Lignin for Fuel and Chemical Production

Lignin consists approxiamately one third amount of carbon in lignocellulosic biomass. Emerging biorefinery will generate enormous amount of lignin. The high C/H ratio made lignin a promising feedstock for fuel and value-added chemical production. Unfortunately, existing lignin to liquid fuel conversion technologies rely on hydrogenation and hydrodeoxygenation, processes with higher energy requirements and excessive usage of external hydrogen that make these technologies uncompetitive with petroleum-based aviation fuel production. In addition, these processes yield aromatic or cyclic hydrocarbons as the main products; the difficulty in manipulating the resulting product chain length significantly limits their application. Selectively converting lignin to open chain hydrocarbon fuel is apparently an appealing idea needs input of efforts.

In this talk, we will present a new chemistry pathway allows production of open-chain hydrocarbon from lignin. The chemistry will generate precursors for fuel and high value chemicals simultaneously. This work also aiming provide new perspectives towards the understanding and design of lignin sequential depolymerization and aromatic ring cleavage.