(544b) Catalytic Conversion of Biomass to Value Added Chemicals and Fuels

Sustainable feedstock derived from biomass has a potential to transform the transportation, energy, and value-added chemicals industry in a major way. There has been extensive research to convert biomass to valuable chemicals and fuels as an alternative to fossil fuels. However, biomass is just a broad term to describe the group of complex bio-molecules with unsaturated carbons and a large network of aromatic rings. This challenges the ability of biomass as an alternative to fossil fuels. Upgradation of biomass to saturated alkanes and chemicals involves several reactions like ring-opening, decarboxylation, hydrodeoxygenation, and condensation of aldols or ketols to form straight long chain alkanes. Since these reactions are energy intensive and require expensive catalysts, the feasible pathway to convert biomass to chemicals and fuels is through gasification. Catalytic biomass gasification is an optimum pathway to convert biomass to quality syngas by catalytically upgrading the biomass structure to minimize tar formation. This approach is attempted to replace hydrogen required for hydrodeoxygenation using shale gas. Shale gas offers an economic substitute to hydrogen which could make biomass upgradation and gasification a commercially viable option.

Ligno-cellulosic biomass is used for upgradation and gasification to produce syngas which can be converted to value added chemicals or directly used as a fuel. Two types of reactor systems have been employed for this study. A fixed bed reactor system is a lab scale reactor for parametric reaction kinetics study of elementary reactions in biomass gasification and tar reforming whereas a bench scale bubbling fluidized bed reactor system is being developed to produce syngas which will be directly used as a fuel for an internal combustion engine at WVU’s Advanced Combustion Lab. Cold flow studies on fluidization of biomass have shown excellent fluidization characteristics.

Catalytic upgradation of biomass using Fe-Mo or Fe-Ga over zeolites is being investigated using a fixed-bed reactor system. The main focus of the research is to ascertain hydrogen transfer mechanism during co-pyrolysis of methane and biomass that is to experimentally validate active role of methane in hydrodeoxygenation of biomass.