The BioCRACK Process - A Refinery Integrated Biomass-to-Liquid Concept to Produce Diesel from Biogenic Feedstock

Second generation biofuels, especially fuels from lignocellulose biomass, which are manufactured from non-food feedstock play a key role to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the dependency on fossil oil. The bioCRACK process represents a new biomass-to-liquid concept to generate advanced biofuel by liquid-phase pyrolysis. As liquid heat carrier vacuum gas oil (VGO), an intermediate heavy oil product from the vacuum distillation, is used. Since autumn 2012 a fully integrated pilot plant at the refinery in Schwechat/Austria with a nominal biomass capacity of 100 kg/h is in continuous operation and generates data for up-scaling the technology to an industrial scale. This paper reports the results of the continuous operation. The influence of various reaction parameters, such as the reaction temperature, on yield and composition of the reaction products were investigated. As expected from previous results with a semi batch lab-scale reactor, within the selected range of temperature (350 °C to 400 °C), elevated temperature leads to decreasing amount of biochar and rising liquefaction. Based on the results could be shown that 10 to 20 % of the biogenic carbon can be transferred directly into raw fuels with the bioCRACK concept. Additionally 11 to 18 % of the bio-carbon merges into the remaining heat carrier.