Catalytic Processing of Biomass to Liquid Fuels

The U.S. has abundant biomass resources and with the right technology, has the potential to convert these renewable resources into valuable industrial products and bio-fuels. However, current high temperature thermochemical processes to convert renewable feedstocks to fuels or chemicals such as pyrolysis and gasification or low temperature enzymatic processes are simply not cost-competitive with conventional fossil-fuel based processes. This SBIR project seeks to produce large volume monomers such as ethylene and propylene from bio-mass, thereby reducing the use of non-renewable raw materials in plastics manufacturing. This project applies novel reaction and reactor concepts with environmentally benign homogeneous and heterogeneous catalysts in a multi-step process that deconstructs and stabilizes biomass before conversion to light olefins