Biofuels are a growing renewable source of energy substituting ever more fossil transportation fuels. Their production process should use raw materials not competing with the food chain. Some of these green diesel routes will be based on liquids derived from pyrolysis of lignocellulosic biomass. A hydrodeoxygenation step is required to produce stable diesel fuels from these oils. Sulfided hydrotreating catalysts appear as good candidates for such processes but usually undergo a continuous deactivation caused by coke formation or partial re-oxidation of the sulfide phase.1'2 Although oxidation has been reported for both model systems3 and real feeds,4 neither the nature of the resulting oxi-sulfide sites phase nor the relative sensitivities of sulfide surfaces to oxidation are known.
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