Non Technical Summary
Renewable fuels offer an opportunity to reduce carbon emissions generated by heavy transportation industries such as trucking and aviation. A major issue hindering the ability for renewable fuel producers to reach desired production rates is the lack of abundance in usable feedstocks. Renewable feedstock oils must meet certain criteria on impurities levels before hydrotreating to protect from destruction of expensive catalyst beds. VFT proposes the use of its proprietary Fiber Reactor technology protected by a global patent portfolio (including patents specific to the desired application) for the efficient and economical valorization of low CI score waste fats and oils as feedstocks to produce renewable fuels which does not require centrifuge or bleaching clays. VFT's technology provides 10x surface area of traditional mixing technologies at a fraction of the size. VFT enables highly efficient immiscible phase mixing with fiber media internals to drive mass transfer of molecules from one immiscible phase to the other. The elimination of chaotic mechanical mixing prevents or significantly minimizes emulsion formation so that the bi-phasic streams exiting the Fiber Reactor are cleanly separated.

Classification

Knowledge Area (KA)	Subject of Investigation (SOI)	Field of Science (FOS)	Percent
403	5299	2000	100%

Knowledge Area
403 - Waste Disposal, Recycling, and Reuse;

Subject Of Investigation
5299 - Agricultural supplies, general/other;

Field Of Science
2000 - Chemistry;

Goals / Objectives
It is incumbent upon renewable fuel producers to supplement feedstocks through the utilization of waste oils which have the added benefit of a low carbon intensity rating (CI). Examples include used cooking oil (UCO), animal fat,yellow grease, brown grease and poultry grease. To date, these have proved to be very problematic feedstock oils and traditional methods of remediation fail to remove the impurities to acceptable levels in an economically viable fashion. VFT develops its proprietary Fiber Reactor technology,protected by a global patent portfolio (including patents specific to the desired application) for the efficient and economical valorization of low CI score waste fats as feedstock oils to produce renewable fuels which does not require centrifuge or bleaching clays.VFT will leverage the expertise of key personnel and experience garnered during similar efforts to remove impurities from distiller's corn oil, an effort which was successfully transitioned from bench to a commercially operating technology package. VFT will seek to transition from TRL 4 to TRL 6 for the pretreatment of waste oil feedstocks during the Phase I effort. This will be accomplished by pursuing 3 broad technical objectives.Technical Objective 1: Benchtop chemical treatment development on commercially relevant waste oil feedstocks to bring chemical impurities within specifications of renewable fuel producersTechnical Objective 2: Transition benchtop chemistry development to Fiber Reactor technologyTechnical Objective 3: Scale Fiber Reactor waste oil treatment process to beta prototype pilot systemFinal Spec Limits on PretreatedFeedstocks Include:FFA <20% ; Total Metals <10ppm; Sodium <2ppm; Sulfur <100ppm; Nitrogen <350ppm; Chloride <50ppm;no free water;Unsaponifiables <1.0 wt%; Insoluble impurities <0.05wt%; polyethylene <50ppm

Project Methods
Technical Objective 1: Benchtop chemical treatment development on commercially relevant waste oil feedstocks to bring chemical impurities within specifications of renewable fuel producersEffort: Commercially relevant waste oil feedstocks such as used cooking oil (UCO), yellow grease, tallow and poultry grease will be sourced. Trials will be conducted on bench in stirred vessels and separatory funnels to determine the correct chemical treatment to target individual impurities. This may include combinations of prefiltration, acidic/basic washes, chelating agents, enzymatic hydrolysis, temperature modification, organic to aqueous ratios, and number of sequential washes required.Evaluation: Chemical impurities will be tracked by a combination of analytical techniques including inductively coupled plasma (ICP), high-pressure liquid chromatography (HPLC), UV-Vis, Karl-Fischer auto titrator. In addition to determining chemical treatments necessary to drive impurities into the aqueous phase, mixing properties of chemical treatments will be monitored and adjusted to diminish water entrainment and emulsion formation between the organic and aqueous phases. Expected Outcomes sectionsdetails the approximate specifications which VFT will seek to attain. These feedstock specificationswere provided to VFT by a renewable fuels producer. Individual plants will vary somewhat on tolerance based on the hydrogenation catalysts being used.Technical Objective 2 (Effort): Transition benchtop chemistry development to Fiber Reactor technologyEffort: Having determined the optimal chemical treatment during Technical Objective 1, this process will be transferred from bench scale Fiber Reactor technology using oil throughput volumes on the order of tens to hundreds of milliliters per minute. VFT observes that chemical treatments performed using traditional stirred mixing techniques improve once reacted in the Fiber Reactor. There are several variables concerning the construction of Fiber Reactor media packing density, organic/aqueous flow rates, separator/settling tank volumes, and number of reactor stages which must be determined to optimize the process.Higher fiber packing densities generally yield higher rate of mass transfer between immiscible phases, but liquid throughput rates decrease as packing densities increase so these two factors must be balanced to achieve scaled desirables. Fiber media diameter follows a similar trend in that as fiber media diameter decreases, total surface area increases and improves mass transfer, however smaller diameter fiber media packs more efficiently leaving less dead volume and therefore lowering overall throughput.Flow rates are another highly impactful variable to performance. Although higher aqueous to organic ratios generally yield improved mass transfer of organic phase impurities to the aqueous stream, water usage must be minimized to reduce input costs and ensure that the renewable fuel processing facilities will have the capacity to treat wastewater generation. VFT will seek to determine the minimum amount of aqueous phase necessary to treat the oil phase. Effluent wastewater from Fiber Reactor can be recycled and reused during the process until saturation limits are reached.Fiber Reactor technology can be used at elevated temperatureasthe components are primarily constructed from stainless steel. It is commonly observed that elevated temperature improves mass transfer between organic and aqueous phases and reduces water entrainment in the contacted organic phase. VFT will conduct Fiber Reactor experiments at ambient and elevated temperature to determine optimal performance while seeking to minimize energy requirements to perform the operation.One of the major benefits of Fiber Reactor technology is the lack of high shear found in impeller driven stirred vessels. This greatly reduces or eliminates formed emulsions from mixing immiscible phases. Minimual emulsion allowsthe separator/settling tank into which the Fiber Reactor terminates to be small which minimizes the footprint of the Reactor in production facilities.Fiber Reactor technology routinely employs several reactors in series to complete a chemical process. This could include sequential acidic, caustic, enzymatic or chelating washes and pure water washes to remove residual water-soluble molecules. VFT will endeavor to limit the number of required stages, but this is a variable which must be determined during process development.Evaluation: The above efforts will be evaluated with the same series of analytical tools as listed under Technical Objectives 1.Technical Objective 3: Scale Fiber Reactor waste oil treatment process to beta prototype pilot systemEffort: The last technical objective will involve scaling the bench scale Fiber Reactor process developed during Technical Objective 2, to a larger pilot system which will be operational at gallon(s) per minute. During this phase, the sequential washing steps established in Technical Objective 2 will be connected in series at scale and operated in continuous mode to simulate the daily operation that is envisioned for the renewable fuels processing plant. In addition to replicating or exceeding best conditions attained at bench scale, considerable initial efforts will be made towards automating the system and programming logic modules which will serve as a beta prototype for the eventual final delivered system.Evaluation: Once each stage has been validated independently in batch mode, efforts will be undertaken to connect each stage in series so that the process may be validated in continuous mode. It will be critical to control oil and aqueous levels entering and exiting each Fiber Reactor in series and to determine start-up protocols to ensure that steady state operation is achieved.Having run the entire oil remediation sequence as a batch mode in series, the last goal of the Phase I program is to run continuously in series processing at liters/minute scale for 8 to 24 hours at a time while maintaining performance to demonstrate plant operability.