(516d) Sustainable Aviation Fuel Production through Co-Hydroprocessing of Catalytic Fast Pyrolysis Oil with Petroleum Streams

Catalytic fast pyrolysis (CFP) is an efficient way to produce stabilized low-oxygen biogenic oil from lignocellulosic biomass, which is an abundant and domestically available feedstock and does not contribute to the competition between food and energy. Hydrotreating can further convert CFP oil into various renewable transportation fuels. Due to the growth in electrification of the light-duty transportation sectors a large distillate hydrotreating capacity is available and ready for use. The studies on co-hydrotreating of CFP oil with petroleum streams can provide routes to incorporate biogenic oil into fuel pool with minimal capital costs. Previously, renewable diesel with a high indicated cetane number of 45 was produced through co-hydrotreating of CFP oil with straight-run diesel (SRD) under a typical refinery SRD hydrotreating condition, which transferred up to 97% of biogenic carbon from CFP oil into final renewable diesel product. In this project, co-hydrotreating of CFP oil with SRD and co-hydrocracking of CFP oil with a mixture of vacuum gas oil (VGO) and light cycle oil (LCO) were conducted. CFP oil with 22% oxygen on dry basis was produced from pine in a bench-scale fluidized bed reactor over an HZSM-5 catalyst, after which the CFP oil was hydroprocessed in a continuous trickle-bed reactor over commercial catalysts. The chemical composition of the co-hydroprocessed products was characterized by elemental analysis, simulated distillation, GCxGC-TOFMS-FID and GC-VUV. The co-hydroprocessed products were fractionated by distillation into fuel cuts, and selected fuel properties (density, viscosity, heating value, freeze point, indicated cetane number) for the co-hydroprocessed sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) product were evaluated and compared with ASTM requirements. Stand-alone hydroprocessing of the petroleum products was studied under the same condition as comparisons. Producing SAF from co-hydroprocessing of CFP oil with petroleum streams has great potential in mitigating GHG emissions at the same time reducing the fuel production costs by making the most of the existing refinery infrastructure, workforce, and institutional knowledge.