Production of Fisher-Tropsch liquids from Biomass-derived Syngas

摘要

Depletion of fossil oil resources, global climate change and national security concerns have made the development of alternative energy increasingly important. Compared to other alternative energy choices, the production of energy and chemicals from biorenewable resources, such as biomass, has attracted increasing research interests in recent years due to the vast potential availability of biomass materials and the availability of existing technologies that potentially enable the production of energy and chemicals in commercial scales in shorter time period. Center for Sustainable Environmental Technologies (CSET) is a research organization at Iowa State University (ISU) that has been working on promoting, developing and demonstrating thermochemical technologies such as gasification and fast pyrolysis, and catalytic upgrading processes, for the production of fuels, chemicals, and energy from biomass. While for many years focuses have been given to gasification and fast pyrolysis technologies for converting biomass into synthesis gas and bio-oil, respectively, in the past two years, CSET researchers have been working on the development of catalytic processes for upgrading syngas and bio-oil into value-added products. This paper is to report the results of research work that has been performed at CSET on the production of liquid fuels from biomass-derived syngas by using Fischer-Tropsch Synthesis (FTS) technology [Dry et al., Anderson et al.]. The work included synthesis and characterization of an FTS catalysts and the demonstration of FTS fuel production from a fixed bed reactor.