Bio-oil production and manufacturing involves converting biomass into usable products.
This process typically uses pyrolysis or hydrothermal liquefaction.
These methods break down the biomass into bio-oil, biochar, and gas.
The final products depend on several factors.
These factors include the type of feedstock, pre-treatment, process, operating conditions, and upgrading.
What is Bio-Oil?
Bio-oil is a dark brown organic liquid.
It is produced from biomass through pyrolysis.
Bio-oil is mainly composed of oxygenated compounds.
These compounds give it high thermal instability and low heating value.
As a result, crude bio-oil has limited applications.
It can only be used as a fuel for boilers, not engines.
The crude bio-oil from woody biomass has poor properties.
These properties include low heating value, high water content, and acidity.
How is Bio-Oil Formed?
Bio-oil forms through the simultaneous fragmentation and depolymerization of cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin.
This happens during fast pyrolysis of biomass.
The rapid heating of biomass and fast quenching of vapor produce bio-oil.
The yield of bio-oil from fast pyrolysis is typically around 50 wt%–70 wt% on a dry biomass basis.
Bio-oil contains a high content of water and hundreds of organic components.
These components include acids, alcohols, ketones, furans, phenols, ethers, esters, sugars, aldehydes, alkenes, nitrogen, and oxygen compounds.
It also has reactive molecules and oligomeric species with molecular weights larger than 5000.
This makes it unstable even at room temperatures.
Why Does Bio-Oil Need Upgrading?
Due to its issues, bio-oil needs to be upgraded before use as an engine fuel.
Upgrading involves physical and chemical treatments.
These treatments remove problems such as high acid content, high water content, and high oxidative and thermal instability.
Physical treatments include the removal of char through filtration and the emulsification of hydrocarbons for stability.
Bio-oils are also fractionated, but after chemical treatments are done.
Chemical treatments include esterification, catalytic de-oxygenation/hydrogenation, thermal cracking, physical extraction, and syngas production/gasification.
What Are the Limitations and Potential of Bio-Oil?
Although bio-oil has its limitations, it can still be used as a boiler fuel or upgraded to renewable transportation fuels.
Its fuel value is generally 50-70% that of petroleum-based fuels.
However, its composition makes it thermally unstable and difficult to distill or further refine.
Therefore, further research is needed to produce higher quality bio-oil.
Despite this, bio-oil has a higher density (>1 kg L-1) compared to biomass feedstocks.
This makes it more cost-effective to transport.
This opens up the possibility of a distributed processing model.
In this model, small-scale pyrolyzers convert biomass to bio-oil on farms.
Then, it is transported to a centralized location for refining.
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