(322a) Catalytic Aromatization of Bio-Derived Liquid Under Methane Environment

Hydrodeoxygenation upgrading is the most popular way to produce bio-oil from biocrude. This approach usually involves continuous hydrogen flow and high operation pressure (15~100 atm), resulting in significantly increased capital and operational costs. Compared to hydrogen, which is not naturally available and thus costly, methane can be readily obtained as natural gas. This work studies the technical feasibility of directly using methane as the reducing agent instead of hydrogen to remove oxygen from a series of model compounds including ethanol, acetic acid, acetone, and phenol, representatives of biocrude derived from low cost carbon resources at low pressure (<5 MPa) and moderate temperatures (400 °C) under the facilitation of transition metal modified aluminosilicate catalysts, the produced aromatics abundant liquid will become more cost competitive. Moreover, methane itself is incorporated into the formed aromatics beneficial for extra liquid chemical production along with lower carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions from the upgrading process. The involved catalytic upgrading mechanism is also intensively studied using isotopic labeling technique coupled with versatile characterizations including NMR, FTIR, XAS, XPS, SIMS, and DSC as well as molecular simulation at DFT level for verifying methane’s participation and benefiting catalyst’s rational design. The outcomes from this research will provide a more efficient and cleaner way to utilize low cost carbon resources and natural gas which are abundant in nature. Furthermore, the successful implementation of the study will be beneficial for the effective reduction of greenhouse gas emission and significant cost reduction of the current bio-oil production process making it more economically feasible.