The fate of bio-carbon in FCC co-processing products

Abstract

A promising alternative to the first generation of bio-fuels is to produce mixed bio- and fossil fuels by co-processing mixtures of biomass pyrolysis oil with crude oil fractions obtained from distillation in a conventional oil refinery. This was demonstrated to be technically feasible for fluid catalytic cracking (FCC), which is the main refinery process for producing gasoline. However, co-processing leads to more coke formation and to a more aromatic gasoline fraction. A detailed understanding is necessary on how the oxygenated moieties effect the reaction mechanism to further improve the process/catalysts. Moreover, for technical and marketing reasons, it is absolutely required to accurately determine the proportion of renewable molecules in the commercialized products. The carbon-14 method (also called radiocarbon or ¹⁴C) has been used as the most accurate and powerful method to discriminate fossil carbon from bio-carbon, since fossil fuel is virtually ¹⁴C-free, while biofuel contains the present-day “natural” amount of ¹⁴C. This technique has shown that not all FCC products share bio-carbon statistically. The coke formed during a FCC cycle and to a lesser extent the gases are found richer in ¹⁴C than gasoline. This result gives valuable information on the co-processing mechanism, supporting that the bio-oil oxygenated molecules are processed more easily at the expenses of the crude oil hydrocarbons, favouring the bio-coke and the bio-light gases production.