Waste oil has a new use, and this technology has turned it into second-generation biodiesel.

Recently, the Qingdao Institute of Bioenergy and Process of Chinese Academy of Sciences (hereinafter referred to as Qingdao Energy Institute of Chinese Academy of Sciences) has received good news: the institute and Shijiazhuang Changyou Bioenergy Co., Ltd. of Hebei Changqing Group have jointly overcome the problem of transforming the fluidized bed homogeneous hydrogenation process to produce second-generation biodiesel, and successfully started the production of second-generation biodiesel in Changyou Bioenergy Company with a scale of 200,000 tons/year, marking that ZKBH homogeneous hydrogenation technology of Qingdao Energy Institute of Chinese Academy of Sciences has become the first technology in the world to successfully mass-produce commercial second-generation biodiesel by liquid molecular catalysis.

As the inventor of ZKBH’s second-generation biodiesel technology and the director of Changyou industrialization project, Dr. Chen Song, a researcher at Qingdao Institute of Energy, Chinese Academy of Sciences, said happily that at present, all the operating indexes of the plant are stable, and the biodiesel yield can reach over 80% in production, reaching the world advanced level, and the product quality meets the standards for exporting to the European Union.

Independent innovation of ZKBH homogeneous hydrogenation technology

Replacing traditional energy with new energy, replacing scarce energy with superior energy, and replacing fossil energy with renewable energy … China is facing an urgent task of developing alternative energy.

However, worldwide, the production technology of the second generation biodiesel is difficult, and all the existing mainstream devices adopt fixed-bed production. The fixed-bed hydrogenation technology is the most widely used and fastest-growing hydrogenation technology in industry at present. However, the fixed-bed hydrogenation requires higher raw materials, and the catalyst is easy to lose its activity, especially for oil with high phosphorus and silicon content, which is easy to be poisoned and reduce its reaction activity, resulting in limited output. However, the raw materials for biodiesel production are complex, with many impurities and high acid value, so it is difficult to directly use fixed bed hydrogenation. Chen Song said that ZKBH homogeneous hydrogenation technology draws lessons from the advantages of suspended bed and fluidized bed residue hydrogenation, and solves the problems that solid catalyst is easy to lose activity and treat bio-oil is easy to pulverize by developing efficient liquid catalyst. At the same time, liquid catalyst can perfectly cooperate with semi-ceramic water-resistant solid catalyst independently developed by Qingdao Energy Institute of Chinese Academy of Sciences to achieve high yield and ensure the long-term operation stability of industrial devices. He believes that the spring of renewable energy and biomass fuel in China is coming soon.

Industry-University-Research combines flowering and fruiting.

Chen Song said that the raw materials of the first generation biodiesel and the second generation biodiesel are the same, but the production process is quite different. The first generation biodiesel is fatty acid methyl ester produced by transesterification technology, and the production process is simple. The second generation biodiesel adopts catalytic hydrogenation process, and the products obtained have different chemical structures, which belong to clean and high-quality hydrocarbon second generation biodiesel obtained by clean hydrogenation process. Compared with the first generation biodiesel, namely fatty acid methyl ester, the second generation biodiesel is identical to diesel in chemical structure, with similar viscosity and calorific value, equivalent oxidation stability and lower emission advantages. It belongs to the same hydrocarbon as petroleum-based diesel oil, which does not affect the storage and transportation of diesel oil, the engine and tail gas treatment, and has higher quality. At the same time, the CO2 emission of the second-generation biodiesel is lower than that of diesel, which can reduce the limited and unrestricted pollutant emissions (including SOx and NOx), reduce the particulate matter emissions, greatly reduce the engine scaling, and significantly reduce the noise.

Talking about the R&D and production process of the second-generation biodiesel technical achievements, Chen Song said that this technical achievement embodies the wisdom and hard work of the team and is the result of the combination of Industry-University-Research.

At the beginning of 2020, Shijiazhuang Changyou Bioenergy Co., Ltd. sought the second-generation biodiesel production technology, and after investigation, it was admired for exchanges and cooperation with Qingdao Energy Institute of Chinese Academy of Sciences. Qingdao Institute of Energy, Chinese Academy of Sciences put forward ZKBH industrialization technical transformation scheme of liquid catalytic fluidized bed hydrogenation coupled with solid catalytic hydrodeoxygenation upgrading, which was immediately launched in Changyou Bioenergy Company, with the first phase of treating 200,000 tons of biomass oil to produce the second generation biodiesel.

After three months of repeated debugging and experiments, the teams of both parties worked together. After all the equipment adjustment and technological process transformation were completed on site and the first batch of liquid catalyst and supporting biodiesel solid upgrading catalyst were delivered to the site, on July 30, the device was officially tested and started, and the feed was switched to 8 tons/hour at a time. The first raw material was biomass raw material with domestic waste oil as the main component. On August 6th, the product was officially produced. The second-generation product, biological product, was water-white, with a density of 0.7903, cetane index close to 100, and sulfur and nitrogen were all less than 5. After being sent to relevant institutions in Shanghai for testing, the product reached the EU standard for biodiesel export, and all the product indicators met the standard. (Reporter Wang Jiangao)