Towards transportation fuel production from food waste: Potential of biocrude oil distillates for gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel

Abstract Biocrude oil from hydrothermal liquefaction (HTL) demonstrates promise as a supplement to the transportation fuel supply. However, its poor chemical (heteroatom content, energy content), physical (viscosity, density), and thermal (boiling point distribution, cetane value, cold-flow properties) characteristics limit commercial application. This study investigated the potential for the biocrude oil distillates derived from the mobile, pilot-scale HTL conversion of food waste to serve as a transportation fuel (gasoline, diesel, jet fuel) blendstock. Distillation increased the H:C (4.2–13.7%), decreased the O:C (5.5–93.5%), decreased the N:C (6.0–39.0%), and augmented the HHV (4.1–21.3%) compared to the biocrude oil, leading to values of 1.97, 0.003, 0.004, and 52.0 MJ•kg−1, respectively. These values were similar to the H:C (1.65, 1.94, 2.02), O:C (0.02, ~0, ~0), N:C (0.0002, 0.002, 0.002), and HHV (50.0, 53.1, 53.4 MJ•kg−1) values of gasoline, diesel, and Jet A fuels, respectively. With respect to the physical properties, distillation decreased the density (23.8–30.5%) and viscosity (99.5–99.9%), while the acidity either increased or decreased depending on the distillation temperature. Despite the benefits of distillation, blending is still required due to the poor N:C, viscosity, and acidity of the distillates. Theoretical blending calculations determined that blending with Jet A was the most favorable blendstock, amounting to deviations of 63.3–316.6% with the Jet A fuel when the distillate proportion ranged from 10 to 50%.