Pretreatment of Animal and Vegetable Waste Fats for Renewable Fuels Processing

USDA-NIFA-SBIR-009301 Biofuels and Biobased Products-Topic Area 8.8Pretreatment of Animal and Vegetable Waste Fats for Renewable Fuels ProcessingP.I. Dr. Scott KohlProject Summary/AbstractRenewable fuels offer an opportunity to offset carbon emissions generated by heavytransportation industries such as trucking and aviation. A major issue hindering the ability forrenewable fuel producers to reach desired production rates is the lack of abundance in usablefeedstocks. Renewable feedstock oils must meet certain criteria on impurities levels beforehydrotreating to protect from destruction of expensive catalyst beds. VFT proposes the use of itsproprietary Fiber Reactor technology protected by a global patent portfolio (including patentsspecific to the desired application) for the efficient and economical valorization of low CI scorewaste fats and oils as feedstocks to produce renewable fuels which does not require centrifuge orbleaching clays. VFT's technology provides 10x surface area of traditional mixing technologiesat a fraction of the size. VFT enables highly efficient immiscible phase mixing with fiber mediainternals to drive mass transfer of molecules from one immiscible phase to the other. Theelimination of chaotic mechanical mixing prevents or significantly minimizes emulsionformation so that the bi-phasic streams exiting the Fiber Reactor are cleanly separated.