title: Novel pathways for fuels and lubricants from biomass optimized using life-cycle greenhouse gas assessment.
abstract: Decarbonizing the transportation sector is critical to achieving global climate change mitigation. Although biofuels will play an important role in conventional gasoline and diesel applications, bioderived solutions are particularly important in jet fuels and lubricants, for which no other viable renewable alternatives exist. Producing compounds for jet fuel and lubricant base oil applications often requires upgrading fermentation products, such as alcohols and ketones, to reach the appropriate molecular-weight range. Ketones possess both electrophilic and nucleophilic functionality, which allows them to be used as building blocks similar to alkenes and aromatics in a petroleum refining complex. Here, we develop a method for selectively upgrading biomass-derived alkyl methyl ketones with >95% yields into trimer condensates, which can then be hydrodeoxygenated in near-quantitative yields to give a new class of cycloalkane compounds. The basic chemistry developed here can be tailored for aviation fuels as well as lubricants by changing the production strategy. We also demonstrate that a sugarcane biorefinery could use natural synergies between various routes to produce a mixture of lubricant base oils and jet fuels that achieve net life-cycle greenhouse gas savings of up to 80%.
authors.affiliation: Energy Biosciences Institute, Berkeley, CA 94720;
authors.forename: Madhesan
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Balakrishnan
authors.affiliation: Energy Biosciences Institute, Berkeley, CA 94720; Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720;
authors.forename: Eric R
authors.initials: ER
authors.lastname: Sacia
authors.affiliation: Energy Biosciences Institute, Berkeley, CA 94720;
authors.forename: Sanil
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Sreekumar
authors.affiliation: Energy Biosciences Institute, Berkeley, CA 94720; Department of Chemistry, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720;
authors.forename: Gorkem
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Gunbas
authors.affiliation: Energy Biosciences Institute, Berkeley, CA 94720; BP North America, Inc., Berkeley, CA 94720;
authors.forename: Amit A
authors.initials: AA
authors.lastname: Gokhale
authors.affiliation: Energy Biosciences Institute, Berkeley, CA 94720; Energy Technologies Area, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720 alexbell@berkeley.edu cdscown@lbl.gov fdtoste@berkeley.edu.
authors.forename: Corinne D
authors.initials: CD
authors.lastname: Scown
authors.affiliation: Energy Biosciences Institute, Berkeley, CA 94720; Department of Chemistry, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720; alexbell@berkeley.edu cdscown@lbl.gov fdtoste@berkeley.edu.
authors.forename: F Dean
authors.initials: FD
authors.lastname: Toste
authors.affiliation: Energy Biosciences Institute, Berkeley, CA 94720; Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720; alexbell@berkeley.edu cdscown@lbl.gov fdtoste@berkeley.edu.
authors.forename: Alexis T
authors.initials: AT
authors.lastname: Bell
mesh_terms: D056804:Biofuels; D018533:Biomass; D005285:Fermentation; D005740:Gases; D017752:Greenhouse Effect
chemical_list: D056804:Biofuels; D005740:Gases
keywords: biofuels; greenhouse gases; life cycle assessment; lubricants; methyl ketones