Design and Assessment of Advanced Thermochemical Plants for Second Generation Biobutanol Production Considering Mixed Alcohols Synthesis Kinetics

In
prior work, the authors’ developed a novel process for
producing second generation biobutanol through a thermochemical conversion
route and mixed alcohols synthesis (MAS) process and showed that it
was economically competitive to the biochemical route and to gasoline
under certain market scenarios. However, the prior work made use of
simplistic conversion models for the MAS reactor based on the U.S.
National Renewable Energy Laboratory future conversion targets for
MAS catalysts. This work improves on the past work by replacing the
simplistic MAS reactor model with a detailed kinetic model using a
pilot-scale demonstrated catalyst leading to a more realistic representation
of the process and enabling the impact of design parameters to be
investigated for various novel process designs. Furthermore, economic
and environmental metrics, such as the minimum butanol selling price
(MBSP) and cost of CO2 equivalent emissions avoided (CCA),
were used to assess the potential of all the process designs.