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.

Selective Product

Deoxygenation hydrogenation separation

H2

Light

biofuels

“Green”

kerosene

Liquid

recycle

Figure 11. Vegetable oil and animal fats conversion technology to renewable fuels of UOP [61]

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.

4. 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.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Ms Iva Simcic and InTech Europe for enabling her to publish this book chapter, while she is grateful to Mr Athanasios Dimitriadis who provided support, offered comments, proofreading and design. Finally she would like to express her apprecia­tion for the financial support provided by the EU project BIOFUELS-2G which is co-fi­nanced by the European Program LIFE+.

Author details

Stella Bezergianni*

Address all correspondence to: sbezerg@cperi. certh. gr

Chemical Processes & Energy Resources Institute (CPERI), Centre for Research & Technolo­gy Hellas (CERTH), Thermi-Thessaloniki, Greece