Recent advances in one-stage conversion of lipid-based biomass-derived oils into fuel components - aromatics and isomerized alkanes

Nowadays, production of biofuels is a rather hot topic due to depleting of conventional fossil fuel feedstocks and a number of other factors. Plant lipid-based feedstocks are very important for production of diesel-, kerosene-, and gasoline-like hydrocarbons. Usually, (hydro)deoxygenation processes are aimed at obtaining of linear hydrocarbons known to have poor fuel characteristics compared to the branched ones. Thus, further hydroisomerization is required to improve their properties as motor fuel components. This review article is focused on conversion of lipid-based feedstocks and model compounds into high-quality fuel components for a single step - direct cracking into aromatics and merged hydrodeoxygenation-hydroisomerization to obtain isoparaffins. The second process is quite novel and a number of the research articles presented in the literature is relatively low. As auxiliary subsections, hydroisomerization of straight hydrocarbons and techno-economic analysis of renewable diesel-like fuel production are briefly reviewed as well.

Molybdenum and tungsten carbides can shine too

In this perspective, we argue that transition metal carbides such as molybdenum and tungsten hold great potential for the catalytic conversions of future feedstocks due to their ability to remain active in the presence of impurities in the feedstock.