Why Biofuels are Essential for Renewable Energy

Energy CIO Insights | Monday, June 15, 2020

It is essential to generate renewable energy as it can be a good substitute for the shortage of fossil-fuel and issues regarding climate change.

FREMONT, CA: Unnecessary and extreme exploitation and consumption of fossil fuel will slowly exhaust the storage in the earth and create climate change increasing the environmental pollution issues. However, biofuels are estimated to be a promising option for future energy as it can be produced in a massive amount. In the United States, the Energy Independence and Security Act has predicted that 16 billion gallons of cellulose can be generated from biofuels by 2022.

However, presently, maximum biofuels are created from grain, which can damage the food supply all over the world. There has been an alternative for the biofuels derived from the grains known as the renewable bio-oil, which is abstracted from the fast pyrolysis of lignocellulosic biomass and can undergo physical applications. The bio-oil is a mixture of multi-component that consists of hydrocarbons, water, and oxygenated compounds. It has few adverse properties like low heating value, highly corrosive, and chemical instability.

Since the bio-oil has some undesirable features, so immense efforts are being taken so that it can be upgraded to achieve chemicals and high-quality fuels. With time and help from technologies, advancement has been possible in enhancing the bio-oil, and a group of techniques has been used for demonstrating that in pilot scale. However, there are still some inbuilt drawbacks with bio-oil like thermal polymerization and poisoning of the catalysts that can create a significant challenge obstructing its enormous applications.

Atmospheric distillation is less expensive and a simple technique that can be utilized to divide the components from the mixtures. Industries have been widely using this technique for almost a century. Although the method is right, this mature method was not successfully used for dividing bio-oil because it was possible to recover a very few distillates due to the thermal polymerization in bio-oil. Moreover, bio-oil is very thermo-unstable and has the tendencies of forming coke when they are being heated, which also disturbs the process of distillation.

There is a new process in which bio-oil can be treated to gain solid fuel, increasing the thermal polymerization speed. These thermally polymerized remains of the distillation have a long HHV known, and it is known as bio-coal. There are several benefits of bio-coal like it can be prepared at a large scale in less time to replace coal, the liquid chemicals do not need any catalysts to harvest, and bio-coal can be a carbon-warehouse.