Catalytic hydrotreating of liquid biomass is continuously gaining ground as the most effective technology for liquid biomass conversion to both ground — and air-transportation fuels. The UOP company of Honeywell, via the technology it has developed for catalytic hydrotreating of liquid biomass (Figure 11), has announced imminent collaboration with oil and airline companies such as Petrochina, Air China and Boeing for the dem­onstration of the sustainable air-transport in China. This initiative will lead a strategic collaboration between the National Energy Agency of china with the Commerce and Development Agency of USA leading to the de­velopment of the new biofuels market in China.

In the EU airline companies collaborate with universities, research centers and biofuels companies in order to confront their extensive con­tribution to CO2 emissions. Since 2008 most airline companies promote the use of biofuels in selected flights as shown in Table 7 [62]. As it is obvious most pilot flights have taken place with Hydrotreated Renewable Jet (HRJ), which is kerosene/jet produced via catalytic hydrotreatment of liquid biomass. Moreover, Lufthansa has also completed a 6-month ex­ploration program of employing HRJ in a 50/50 mixture with fossil kero­sene in one of the 4 cylinders of a plane employed for the flight between Hamburg-Frankfurt-Hamburg with excellent results [63].

Besides the future applications for air-transportation, the automotive industry is also exhibiting increased interest for the broad use of biofuels resulting from catalytic hydrotreatment of liquid biomass. In fact these paraffinic biofuels can be employed in higher than 7%v/v blending ratio (which is the maximum limit for FAME) as they exhibit high cetane num­ber and have significant oxidation stability [64]

The highest interest is exhibited by oil companies around the catalytic hydrotreatment of liquid biomass technology for the production of biofu­els and particularly to its application to oil from micro-algae. ExxonMobil has invested 600M$ in the Synthetic Genomics company of the pioneer scientist Craig Ventner aiming to research of converting micro-algae to biofuels with minimal cost. BP has also invested 10M$ for collabora­tion with Martek for the production of biofuels from micro-algae for air-, train-, ground — and marine transportation applications.

2.2 CONCLUSION

Catalytic hydrotreatment of liquid biomass is the only proven technol­ogy that can overcome its limitations as a feedstock for fuel production (low H/C ratio, high oxygen and water content). Even though it has re­cently started to be investigated as an alternative technology for biofuels production, it fastly gains ground due to the encouraging experimental results and successful pilot/demo and industrial applications. Catalytic hydrotreatment of liquid biomass leads to a wide range of new alterative fuels including bio-naphtha, bio-jet and biodiesel, are paraffinic in nature and as a result exhibiting high heating values, increased oxidation stability and negligible acidity and corrosivity. As a result it is not over-optimistic to claim that this technology will broaden the biofuels market into scales capable to actually mitigate the climate change problems.