Co-Processing Biomass With Fossil Fuels

Co-processing biomass with fossil fuels is considered as a promising technology to meeting the increasing energy demands while reducing the consumption of fossil fuels and the negative impacts to the environment. Drop-in biofuels that are potential replacement to petroleum fuels are essential to emission reduction in transportation and energy sectors. Biocrudes produced from thermochemical conversion are not applicable for direct implementation. Co-processing biocrudes with petrocrudes using existing refining infrastructure is an economic and ready-to-use option to help refineries decarbonize and advance biofuels production. Intensive efforts have been employed on co-processing through flexible fluid catalytic cracking (FCC) operations and demonstrated that the FCC units are able to tolerate biocrudes. Moreover, pioneering studies indicate that co-hydroprocessing is likely to be an option at the refinery plants. More work is needed to optimize FCC and determine the application of co-hydroprocessing.