Honeywell’s UOP: Biofuels Digest’s 2014 5-Minute Guide

Honeywell’s UOP has developed a renewable jet fuel processing technology, as well as a joint venture. UOP and Ensyn announced the formation of a new joint venture, dubbed Envergent Technologies, that will market technologies and equipment for generating power, transportation fuel and heating oil from biomass using pyrolysis.

The joint venture will utilize forest and agriculture residues as feedstocks in a Rapid Thermal process, where feedstocks are heated in the absence of oxygen, to produce pyrolysis oils that can be utilized directly in heating oil or power gen.

UOP also owns a Renewable Energy & Chemicals business that produced green diesel using its Ecofining process. 

Rankings
50 Hottest Companies in Bioenergy: 2012/13, #24

Biofuels Digest Awards:
Biofuels Digest’s 2012 Best Technology Extension Award: Envergent—Kapolei, HI

The Situation:
UOP has been continuing to deploy Honeywell Green Fuel in signature tests — without an ongoing commercial scale production facility yet to be built. The latest tests? Flight testing in Colombia in October and with the Italian Navy in 2014, both highly successful.

In April 2012, Ensyn and Honeywell announced two breakthrough claims at the Advanced Biofuels Leadership Conference. First, that their pyrolysis process is capable of producing RTP fuel at scale, a crude oil competitor for a price of $45 per barrel (of oil equivalent). RTP fuel can be upgraded at the refinery – using modified but standard refinery equipment.

Last July, the Midwest Aviation Sustainable Biofuels Initiative, led by United Airlines, Boeing, Honeywell’s UOP, the Chicago Department of Aviation and the Clean Energy Trust, released their recommendations from MASBI’s year-long study of the potential for aviation biofuels in the Midwest.
“For every 5% of petroleum jet fuel that can be offset by biofuels [in the Midwest],” the report’s authors said, “nearly 3,600 jobs will be created and 150,000 tons of carbon emissions will be avoided annually.

MASBI recommended 14 steps, and we looked at those here.

Model:
Licensor; often develops technologies in partnerships.

Past milestones:

In 2006-09, Virgin Atlantic, Continental, Japan Air Lines and Air New Zealand and the group as a whole conducted a series of laboratory, ground and flight tests, indicating that test fuels performed as well as or better than typical petroleum-based Jet A. The tests revealed that using the Bio-SPK fuel blends had no adverse effects on the engines or their components. They also showed that the fuels have an average 1.8 percent greater energy content by mass than typical petroleum-derived jet fuel.

In 2009, at the Paris Air Show Boeing and a series of partners involved in four biofuels-based test flights released the data from the tests, and said that with the release they are on a path towards flight certification of biofuels as soon as late 2010.

In November 2012, UOP is renovated an Eni oil refinery near Venice to produce renewable diesel. The two-step process called UOP/Eni Ecofining takes vegetable oils such as palm or soy oils, as well as algal oils and waste cooking oil to produce its Green Diesel. The plan is to eventually convert Eni’s entire Venice refinery to the new technology.

In October 2013, UOP announced that Honeywell Green Jet Fuel produced using Honeywell’s UOP Renewable Jet Fuel process powered the first commercial flight in Colombia operating with renewable jet fuel. A LAN Airbus A320 aircraft traveled with 174 passengers from Bogotá El Dorado International Airport to Santiago de Cali, Colombia. One of the aircraft’s two engines was powered by a 30/70 blend of Honeywell Green Jet Fuel and petroleum-derived jet fuel. The renewable fuel was made with natural oils from camelina, an inedible plant that grows in conditions where food crops can not be grown. The flight marked the first time any aircraft in Colombia has flown on renewable jet fuel.

In January 2014, the Italian naval ship ITS Foscari was refuelled with 30 cubic meters of green F76 and the day after, during the sea trial, its two 6480 kW/each propulsion diesel engines and its three 940 kW/each gensets on board burned 28 cubic meters (740 gallons) of NATO naval fuel standard compliant green F76.

The green F76 was blended with 50% in volume of petroleum derived marine gasoil and 50% of second generation advanced biofuel obtained through the Ecofining hydro-treatment process, developed by ENI and Honeywell’s UOP to convert fatty acids and triglycerides, (acquired via vegetable oils and tallow).

The process produces Honeywell Green Diesel — a high performing diesel fuel that can be used without any modification to the existing equipments on board, and that it is fully compatible with current logistic system.

Future milestones:

Commercial deployments of Honeywell Green Fuel
Commercial scale-up for Envergent.

Website.