Researchers Develop Enhanced Bio-oil for Diesel Fuel Extender or Substitute

www.greencarcongress.com ^ | 5/18/2007 | Staff

[Red Badger]

A team of University of Georgia (UGA) researchers has developed an enhanced pyrolysis-derived bio-oil from pine wood chips. The new and still-unnamed fuel can be blended with biodiesel and petroleum diesel to power conventional engines.

Although it has long been possible to produce bio-oils via pyrolysis, the resulting product was too difficult or too expensive to process to enable its use in conventional engines. The new process, which the researchers are patenting, inexpensively treats the bio-oil so that it can be used in unmodified diesel engines or blended with biodiesel and petroleum diesel.

The exciting thing about our method is that it is very easy to do. We expect to reduce the price of producing fuels from biomass dramatically with this technique.

—Tom Adams, director of the UGA Faculty of Engineering outreach service The process pyrolizes wood chips and pellets to create charcoal (up to 1/3 of the dry weight of the wood) and a gas. Condensation of the gas produces liquids composed of two phases: an oily bottom phase and an aqueous phase. The removal of most of the water present in the aqueous phase results in the formation of a second oily phase the researchers call “polar oil.”

The oily bottom phases were more soluble in biodiesel than the polar oils. Monolignols, furans, sugars, extractive-derived compounds, and a relatively small fraction of oligomers were the main bio-oil compounds soluble in biodiesel. Water and low-molecular-weight compounds responsible for many of the undesirable fuel properties of bio-oils were poorly dissolved in biodiesel.

At the end, about 34% of the bio-oil (or 15 to 17% of the dry weight of the wood) can be used to power engines. The researchers are currently working to improve the process to derive even more oil from the wood.

The researchers have also set up test plots in Tifton, Ga., to explore whether the charcoal that is produced when the fuel is made can be used as a fertilizer. Adams said that if the economics work for the charcoal fertilizer, the biofuel would actually be carbon negative.

Although the new biofuel has performed well, according to Adams, further tests are needed to assess its long-term impact on engines, its emissions characteristics and the best way to transport and store it.

[Red Badger]

Pining for the Fords?.........

[Red Badger]

Rest In Peace, old friend, your work is finished....... If you want on or off the DIESEL ”KnOcK” LIST just FReepmail me........ This is a fairly HIGH VOLUME ping list on some days......

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Oh this sounds good....but what is pyrolysis?

[Lagrange Point]

Heating of the wood to high temps without any air, so you don't get CO2. Many products are extracted from pyrolysis'

L.P.

[BlazingArizona]

Pining for the Fords?.........

I wonder how many miles a diesel F-350 would get on one redwood?

[rusty millet]

No redwoods around here. Just pine trees.

[roaddog727]

Pining for the pines,then.

[R. Scott]

Sounds hopeful.

[Red Badger]

Pyrolysis is the chemical decomposition of organic materials by heating in the absence of oxygen or any other reagents, except possibly steam. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrolysis

[Red Badger]

I wonder how many miles a diesel F-350 would get on one redwood?

I'll go out on a limb and say it would probably leaf all the Chevys in the ashes, barking it's tires.........

[timer]

This sounds like the Karrick method, developed way back in the 1920s/30s; as described in an Infinite Energy magazine article many years ago. This process was completely ignored by the oil industry then, as a competitor; now simply rediscovered as something “new”, it isn’t.

[Red Badger]

Sounds like they re-discovered turpentine..........that's been around for millennia......

[Jack of all Trades]

Interesting.

Running the numbers from the article, the yield would be about 60 gallons of oil per cord of feedstock, plus the fuel for the process heat.

[Kenny Bunk]

Ernie, it's break down by high heat. "Destructive Distillation." They have been making Pine Tar, Turpentine, cough medicine, and god knows what else from pine trees since before independence. "Naval Stores," it used to be called.

BFD, The Japs and NAZIS used this method to make gasoline from pine wood in WWII. If it was good enough for Tojo and Hitler, well by golly, oughta be good enough for us. Wait till the greenies find out you have to ...gasp.... chop down the pine trees that are our Mother Gaia's glorious mantle!

O the huge manatee!

[timer]

In our sawmills here they say that they harvest everything from the tree except the scream of the saws. It’s long been known that turpentine, other hydrocarbons can be gotten from pine needles, tree sap. That word “char” jogged my memory. Find that article in Infinite-Energy.com magazine on the Karrick(sp?)process that he developed long ago. He was working with oil shale I believe but it was simply ignored by the oil industry then, all but forgotten. It’s not exactly syncrude as such, just carbonization w/o oxygen, and much cheaper than syncrude.

But not being an expert like you in this area Thackney, I defer to you to check it out. What I DO know is that all the technical genius ever born isn’t just HERE right now, there were GIANTS in the days of yore as well.

[thackney]

I’m not an expert, just an energy data nut who likes to google.

I don’t see this as new either, just a new process of extracting what has been used before.

[Red Badger]

Wasn’t it Einstein who said: “If I have seen farther into the future, it is only because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.”.............?

[timer]

Well, good luck to them anyway, we’ve got WORLD’S FULL of trees out west here, growing(and BURNING)like weeds. So maybe these folks can add on a wood chip processing unit to sawmills and make hydrocarbons a whole lot easier than chewing up all the corn for ethanol.