NREL and Johnson Matthey Announce Five-Year Collaboration on Biofuels
Goal is to develop new catalysts to lower costs for producing biofuels
Friday, December 14, 2012
The U.S. Department of Energy's National
Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) will partner with Johnson Matthey, a global
specialty chemicals company, in a five-year, $7 million effort to economically
produce drop-in gasoline, diesel and jet fuel from non-food biomass feedstocks,
the federal laboratory announced today.
The work will be conducted under a
Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) between NREL and Johnson
Matthey.
"It's a way of leveraging the expertise of
two organizations to solve a pressing national and international problem," NREL
Senior Project Leader for Partnership Development Rich Bolin said. The goal is
to improve vapor phase upgrading during the biomass pyrolysis process in order
to lower costs and speed production of lignocellulose-based fuels.
"We're delighted to be collaborating with
NREL in this exciting field," Andrew Heavers, Business Development Director for
New Technologies at Johnson Matthey, said. "Combining Johnson Matthey's
understanding of catalysis with NREL's biomass processing capabilities will help
accelerate the development of more economic routes to biofuels."
It's a meeting of heavyweights. NREL is a
world leader in biomass conversion research and will be conducting the necessary
testing, from bench scale to pilot scale. Johnson Matthey is one of the world's
leading suppliers of catalysts and process technologies for a range of
environmental and chemical applications, with facilities in the United Kingdom,
the United States and over 30 other countries around the world. As part of this
agreement, the company will supply and develop innovative new catalytic
materials to upgrade pyrolysis vapor to biofuel components.
The non-food derived feedstocks used to
produce the biofuels will vary from fast-growing poplar or pine trees to switch
grass, forest and agriculture residue and municipal solid waste. It will not
include anything that is actually food for humans.
The vapor produced from the pyrolysis of
biomass can be used to make transportation fuel, if industry can efficiently
convert it into the hydrocarbons similar to petroleum-based fuels used in modern
engines.
Pyrolysis involves thermally decomposing
organic materials using heat and pressure in the absence of oxygen. Although the
pyrolysis vapors contain carbon that can be condensed into an oil, impurities in
that condensed oil make it not suitable to be used in an engine or even readily
converted into a fuel. This CRADA will develop catalytic materials that can
convert these vapors into liquid fuels that can be use in cars, trucks, train
engines and jets.
"The best outcome would be, in five years,
to have a new catalytic process which can make gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel at
a price range that is better than, or competitive with, the cost of existing
fuels," Nimlos said.
If that happens, industry would face less risk in getting the financing
necessary to scale up biofuels technologies, and the industry will move closer
to producing hydrocarbon fuels from biomass for about $3 per gallon, which is a
2017 DOE goal.
Nimlos said the agreement means the two
teams of experts will work together from the very beginning, when the
experimental and testing scale is smallest. "We'll scale up the equipment, while
Johnson Matthey develops and scales up the catalysts," he said. "By working
together and sharing our expertise, we'll make a lot more progress."
NREL is the U.S. Department of Energy's
primary national laboratory for renewable energy and energy efficiency research
and development. NREL is operated for DOE by the Alliance for Sustainable
Energy, LLC.
Visit NREL online at www.nrel.gov
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