What is it about?

This study considers thirteen coprocessing pathways for a current oil refinery, including vegetable oil (VO), fast pyrolysis oil (FPO), hydro-deoxygenated oil (HDO), catalytic pyrolysis oil (CPO), hydrothermal liquefaction oil (HTLO), and Fischer–Tropsch fuels. A techno-economic assessment and CO2 mitigation estimation were carried out for liquid fuel production, taking biomass co-processing and current fossil pathways. Up to 15% of fuels produced by the refinery could be replaced by biofuel without significant changes in the core infrastructure. The consequent reduction in CO2 emissions varied from 33% to 84% compared with pure equivalent fossil fuels replaced (i.e., gasoline and diesel).

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Why is it important?

Advanced Biofuels has failed to deliver its promises to decarbonize fuels mainly due to low availability of sustainable biomass, high production cost, low scalability, limited stability, and limited access to a vast logistic network to reach final users. The oil and gas industry owns these outstanding industrial and markets features. Thus, biomass processing integration to current oil refineries infrastructure can play a decisive role in fuels decarbonization at a large scale and climate change targets.

Perspectives

Current global decarbonization strategy must find key drivers for a rapid CO2 mitigation of the transport sector. Electrification is part of the solution, but capital investment by final users, infrastructure, raw material availability, among others can't deliver the pace need to reach 1.5C. Biomass coprocessing instead might offer a straightforward technology deployment and significant mitigation potential.

EDGAR YANEZ
Ecopetrol

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This page is a summary of: Assessing bio‐oil co‐processing routes as CO 2 mitigation strategies in oil refineries, Biofuels Bioproducts and Biorefining, November 2020, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1002/bbb.2163.
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