Lecture 13 Pyrolysis & Liquefaction

Thermal conversion does not make things, it really just breaks them down. This means if you want to make large sized chemicals or chemicals that don’t look like small pieces of lignin and cellulose, thermal conversion cannot be the only conversion utilized or shouldn’t be the conversion of choice. This is especially relevant with pyrolysis as the products look very much like small pieces of cellulose and lignin.

Pyrolysis Oil is often called bio-oil. This is a silly naming convention because pyrolysis oils look nothing like oils. They have an entirely different set of organic chemistries almost entirely the opposite of what oils like petroleum and vegetable oil have. The name bio-oil was coined because it was a thick, dark product that looked like oil, not because it actually was oil. Based on that kind of logic molasses and liquid chocolate should also be call oils. At this point we are stuck with the misleading name bio-oil, but it is important to remember it is only called oil because of how it looks sometimes, not because it has anything in common with real oils.

Written slide notes and support materials for each lecture can be found at the Bioenergy Education Initiative site (http://agsci.oregonstate.edu/bioenerg...) at Oregon State University

An associated online E-campus course, BRR 350 Introduction to Regional Bioenergy (http://ecampus.oregonstate.edu/soc/ec...) is also offered at OSU

The Bioenergy Education Initiative is part of Advanced Hardwood Biofuels Northwest, supported by AFRI Competitive Grant 2011-68005-30407 from USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture