Catalytic Conversion of Pyrolysis Gas in the WoodRoll Process for Enhancing Process Reliability

This project was a cooperation between the division of Chemical Technology at KTH, Cortus Energy and Haldor Topsoe A/S. The goal was to build up a totally new setup for converting and deoxygenate pyrolysis bio-oil, in order to increase the performance of Cortus Energy’s WoodRoll process. Therefore an iron based catalyst from Haldor Topsoe was used. The building up of the new setup with all reactors and the control panel was a complicated and time-consuming work. This led to an only short time slot for performing experiments, which means that more work needs to be done to get more valuable results. The most important success of this project was to get all the knowledge about the system and to make everything (the whole experimental setup) running properly. However, the sampling system needs to be improved before making further experiments. The experiments which have been done show promising results and that the iron based catalyst was working well for converting the bio-oil. During the two hour long experiment there were not shown any indications of deactivation, when looking at the gas compositions, but the results from temperature programmed oxidation (TPO) show carbon deposition on the catalyst and the BET surface area also shows a slight decrease in surface area.