Recipient Organization
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
902 Battelle Boulevard
Richland,WA 99352
Performing Department
(N/A)
Non Technical Summary
The proposed technology will provide an efficient, environmentally sound conversion path from renewable, biomass feedstock to HMF. HMF has the potential to be a common platform for production of range of products, from small volume, high value specialty chemicals to very high volume, low unit cost, liquid fuels. HMF as a petrochemical-scale building block presents a particularly attractive opportunity in terms of both product value and industry capacity. HMF has a strong potential to replace petroleum-derived aromatic chemical feedstock Para-xylene (PX) for production of polyesters and polyamides, which accounts for 20-30% of current petrochemical industry volume. The annual output of PX is about 30 million ton/year, equivalent to 12 billion gallons of gasoline, with strong growth rate. If all polyester and polyamide product can be made of HMF, 12 billion gallons/year ($30 billion/year at $2.50/gallon) of aromatics currently used as feedstock for those products can be blended as high quality gasoline, displacing an equivalent volume of crude oil. At any production scale, the HMF feedstock is derived from annually renewable resources and so would be advantageous on the basis of greenhouse gas emissions. For the petrochemical application CO2 emission credit could be worth up to one $billion/year (at $35 per ton). Additional benefits of the ionic liquid-based catalytic process for HMF production include flexibility for feedstock, capacity, and product application. These attributes will promote rural economic development, job creation, and reduction in import of petroleum and petroleum products. The raw carbohydrate feedstock will be derived from various, locally available, renewable biomass resources, including wood, corn cobs, starch, sugar cane, switch grass, etc. Small size production facilities (several tons per day) may be built to produce HMF for specialty chemical application to address local market needs. This is overall a multi-billion dollar/year industry, segmented over hundreds of small-volume products. The petrochemical-scale HMF plants (hundreds of tons per day) may be regional facilities built to supply raw material for plastics industry, with an overall market size of tens of billions dollar per year.
Animal Health Component
50%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
(N/A)
Applied
50%
Developmental
50%
Goals / Objectives
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and UOP LLC (a Honeywell company) collaborate on research to develop an economically-viable process for direct catalytic conversion of biomass to 5-hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF). HMF is a key intermediate and a flexible platform for producing chemicals and fuels that can substitute for today's petroleum-derived feedstock. This work is based on earlier PNNL discoveries and inventions that showed catalytic conversion of sugars to HMF at high selectivity and conversion using a soluble catalyst in an ionic liquid solvent. The objective of the current project is to translate these results into a process that is suitable for future commercialization. Necessary performance data will be generated for conceptual process design and economic analysis with a near-term goal of producing HMF at a cost comparable to para-xylene, a major petrochemical feedstock used for polymer applications. Key deliverables from this project are: -A scalable, continuous flow reaction process using recycled ionic liquid, with HMF yields equal to or better than batch reactions with fresh ionic liquid charge; -A practical separation process to produce 99% pure HMF while recovering 99.9% of the ionic liquid and catalyst from the reactor effluent for recycling; and, -Demonstration of the impact of different feedstock carbohydrates (fructose, glucose, mixed sugar, and cellulosic biomass) on HMF yield and process conditions. The final outcome of the project will be a preliminary design for an industrial-scale HMF process, accompanied by a techno-economic evaluation and a Life Cycle Analysis to validate commercial potential and environmental impacts.
Project Methods
HMF, of interest since the 1890's because of its potential application in a wide variety of desirable end products, is an extremely attractive biobased platform for chemicals and fuels. The primary barrier to using HMF in high-volume chemical and fuel applications is its high cost and correspondingly low availability. PNNL and UOP are developing a novel continuous flow, ionic liquid-based catalytic process for production of HMF from low-cost sugar feedstock by pursuing ttechnology innovations in both catalytic reaction and product separation aspect. Novelty of this work in the catalytic conversion aspect is to achieve high one-pass HMF yield by conducting dehydration of sugars in an ionic liquid medium. The ionic liquid has some distinctive advantages over other solvent systems. The ionic liquid is not volatile and allows reactions to be conducted at elevated temperatures under atmospheric or low pressures. The ionic liquid provides certain solubility for sugars to be dissolved and dispersed uniformly so that HMF can be produced at high yields with minimal production of byproducts. Research activities in this area include elucidation of key reactor design parameters, reactor configurations (batch versus continuous reactor design), ionic liquid purity, water content in the ionic liquid, feedstock composition, feedstock-to-ionic liquid ratio, reaction temperature, and reaction residence time. Innovations in the separation aspect are to identify and develop a practical separation strategy that enables isolation of HMF product and nearly complete recycling of the ionic liquid from the reacted product mixture. A major challenge for a commercial ionic liquid-based catalytic process is the high cost of ionic liquids relative to conventional solvents today. Since the ionic liquid is used as the solvent - a major constituent in the reaction mixture, the material cost for any required replacement has a direct impact on the overall process cost., and recycling of the ionic liquid is necessary. This project focuses on adsorption technology approaches based on literature reviewing and analysis as well as preliminary experimental tests. In an adsorption separation process, a reacted product stream is allowed to pass through an adsorbent bed, HMF is selectively adsorbed and the ionic liquid is left intact. Once the adsorbent bed is saturated, the adsorbent is rejuvenated by fluid flushing to release the adsorbed HMF as a product stream and other residuals. The research activities in this area include discovery of a feasible adsorbent material, determination of favorable adsorption and regeneration conditions for operation of an adsorbent bed, isolation of HMF product, recovery of ionic liquids, and assessment of other promising separation means such as supercritical CO2 extraction. Pure sugar (fructose) is used for process research & development, while impacts of different feedstock on conversion economics will be evaluated by batch kinetics tests. Finally, technical and economic analysis for scale-up will be conducted with inputs of experimental data and subject matter expertise.