Eastern red cedar, a middle sized conifer with a pyramidal shape, is native to the Eastern United States. Due to strong resilience towards various soil and climate conditions, eastern red cedar has become an invading species on the prairies, which has aggressively spread to the Midwest states. For example, in Oklahoma, more than seven million acre land is covered by eastern red cedar1. The invasion of eastern red cedar leads to severe impacts on the local ecosystems, such as loss of native plants and birds, reduction of forage production and livestock handling, impacts on soil hydraulic properties. Last but not least, eastern red cedar contains chemical compounds that burn rapidly which makes it a susceptible to forest fire. Currently the best control available to prevent eastern cedar from encroaching the prairies is cutting the trees and then burning them. Up till now, application of eastern red cedar is mainly focused on the extraction of cedarwood oil, which is an important feedstock for the production of fragrances, essential oils, insecticides and antifungals . Several approaches such as steam distillation, solvent extraction and super critical fluid extraction have been used to recover cedar wood oil. The oil yield depends mainly on the techniques used and the properties of the wood. However, on average, the oil yield from eastern red cedar reported in the literature only ranges from 1 to 4.6% ! Such low production of oil will definitely become a challenge for the efficient utilization of eastern red cedar. Therefore, alternative techniques and processes that can utilize most of the biomass with the lowest cost should be investigated. Fast pyrolysis of eastern red cedar for bio-oil production has potential to utilize most of the biomass. The pyrolysis-derived bio-oil could be either upgraded to transporting fuel in biorefineries or used for chemical extraction. Compared to fast pyrolysis, steam distillation requires much longer residence time (more than 20 hrs), solvent extraction undergoes in high pressure condition (1500-10000 psi) '. Moreover, cedar wood oil recovery methods also use more complex reactor systems. Thus, fast pyrolysis can provide a cost-effective route to utilize the eastern red cedar. The objective of this paper was to investigate the impacts of pyrolysis operation conditions including pyrolysis temperature, gas flow rate and particle size on the bio-oil yield, bio-oil properties and carbon conversion efficiency using eastern red cedar as the biomass feedstock. This study was designed to validate the fast pyrolysis as an efficient method to utilize eastern red cedar.
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