Bio-oil can also be used in furnaces and boilers to produce heat and power after moderate upgrading (Czernik and Bridgwater 2004). Recently, researchers have focused specifically on converting bio-oil to hydrocarbon fuels which are compatible with petroleum fuels. Bio-oil consists of several hundred compounds and separation is very challenging because the concentrations of the chemicals are low and any separation techniques must take into consideration interactions by many other functional groups present in the bio-oil.

Acknowledgements

We appreciate Madhura Sarkar, a graduate student, for helping collect some of the data for this chapter. Financial support is provided, in part, by Oklahoma Agricultural Experiment Station and National Science Foundation under Grant No. EPS-0814361.