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Creating pathways to renewable fuels, chemicals, and materials through improved catalyst formulations and integrated process development.
Integrating biomass-derived intermediates into traditional petroleum refineries presents unique challenges and opportunities, requiring innovative analysis approaches that account for biofuel producers and refiners. Consequently, teams within the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have developed a comprehensive refinery integration analysis framework that combines experimental data, detailed techno-economic analyses of bio-conversion pathways, and economic projections within refinery linear programming (LP) optimization models. These models enable the identification of promising bio-integration strategies tailored to specific refinery configurations, economic conditions, and production goals. They also capture upstream and downstream impacts, highlighting critical bottlenecks and research opportunities for increasing the share of biogenic feedstocks in traditional refining operations. Refinery models are also packaged into a broader bio-economy optimization framework which enables biofuel supply chain optimization with standalone biofuel production and refinery co-processing/repurposing options. This presentation discusses promising refinery bio-integration strategies along with key challenges and opportunities identified using NREL's refinery and bio-economy optimization frameworks.
On October 16-17, 2024, in Long Beach, California, the U.S. DOE Bioenergy Technologies Office (BETO), in collaboration with Sandia National Laboratories, NREL, PNNL, and LANL, convened experts from industry and academia to explore the potential for utilizing existing petroleum refinery infrastructure to expand the bioeconomy. Although refinery integration is not a new concept, recent trends have revitalized interest in this topic.
With the ongoing push to decarbonize energy use and especially greenhouse gas emissions across all sectors, there are incentives to investigate how nuclear reactors may be used to generate clean energy and be used in various energy economies beyond just the electrical grid. Two initial integrations, high temperature steam electrolysis (HTSE) and oil refineries, are investigated in this first DOE Integrated Energy Systems (IES) program detailed industrial integration design report. Increasingly detailed reports are anticipated both for the industries discussed in this report and for additional industries in the future of the program. This report is a robust starting point showing how integration thermodynamic analysis establishes the requirements on the reactor and methods by which those requirements can be evaluated for specific reactor designs. Two Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program awardees are selected as representative designs for their respective technologies: NuScale for light-water reactors (LWRs) and X-Energy for high temperature gas reactors (HTGRs). Other reactor technologies or specific reactor configurations would require specific analysis similar to what is done in this report, thus this report can be a reference point by which to extend this work to other nuclear plant designs.
The IES program has identified specific industries that are high priority for characterizing nuclear thermal integration. Foundational reference integration designs are needed both for research reference and communication with industry.
The objective of the NREL Thermochemical Platform Analysis (WBS 2.1.0.302) project is to inform and guide R&D priorities for thermal and catalytic conversion processes by providing process design and techno-economic analysis (TEA). This is achieved through close collaboration with researchers and external experts, along with the use of both commercially available modeling tools and the development or use of collaboration-derived domain-specific tools and resources, such as refinery integration, kinetic and reactor models, phase equilibrium models, and pertinent bio-products market studies. This project is directly aligned with DOE-BETO goals, with the enabling of technology advancements and cost reduction for biomass derived biofuels being one of its primary objectives. TEA-guided research facilitated by this project has helped achieve significant modeled cost reductions for the ex situ catalytic fast pyrolysis (CFP) pathway and the indirect liquefaction (IDL) pathway for the conversion of syngas to high-octane gasoline (HOG). Cost reduction through refinery integration, development of valuable co-products, and other options are being identified for future research to help reduce the modeled MFSP to $2.50/GGE by 2030. Additional priorities anticipated in the future, such as the use of renewable electricity for liquid fuels and products, and emphasis on waste utilization are also being explored in conjunction with research on catalytic utilization of syngas and other gases (including CO2). Industry-relevant parameters are given deliberate attention as part of the work done under this project to help answer questions important for future commercialization and address associated risks.
Recent work at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and throughout the bioenergy community has highlighted incentives associated with co-processing bio-intermediates in existing refineries to reduce capital costs associated with renewable fuels and chemicals production and reduce overall risk for emerging biomass conversion technologies. This presentation summarizes the techno-economic analysis results from the NREL-Petrobras collaboration that focused on refinery integration of fast pyrolysis oil through co-processing in the fluid catalytic cracking (FCC) process. The NREL-Petrobras work highlights the economic opportunity for refiners to engage in co-processing for low-carbon products and introduces the risks for refiners based on variability in crude and fossil-product markets. The NREL-Petrobras results also serve as a basis to inform policy design that reduces economic risk for refinery co-processing and repurposing opportunities. The final topics in the presentation highlight experimental capabilities and emerging analysis approaches at NREL and partner laboratories that support the development and commercial deployment of refinery utilization strategies.
This presentation goes over polymerization observed in CFPs driven by thermally labile oxygenates. Lower oxygen oils have improved stability and a few percent decrease in oxygen greatly improves stability. Further improvements could be realized via targeted catalytic development and further reduction in reactive species. High stability CFP will help enable refinery integration of biogenic carbon.
POET-DSM Advanced Biofuels, in collaboration with parent companies, POET and DSM, has successfully designed, constructed, and continuously operated Project Liberty, a 770 bone-dry ton per day (tpd) nameplate capacity, 20 million gallon (cellulosic bioethanol) per year demonstration scale integrated biorefinery (IBR). The IBR produced cellulosic bio-ethanol from agriculture waste (corn stover) feedstock using next-generation pretreatment and enzymatic conversion technologies. The IBR plant was built and demonstrated operations in Emmetsburg, Iowa. The schedule for this IBR project is illustrated in Figure E1. Due to uncontrollable market factors and COVID-19 pandemic, cellulosic bioethanol production ceased near the end of 2019 and remaining operations were idled June of 2020.
The Department of Energy’s (DOE) Integrated Energy Systems (IES) program is generating comprehensive analyses validating the opportunity for using nuclear energy in a variety of applications including future clean grids, providing heat for direct use, and providing heat to help reduce emissions in chemical commodities. This work focuses on the preliminary designs of thermal delivery systems that can integrate heat produced from a nuclear core to industrial processes. The key research question that needs to be answered is: what is the prospective method for integrating nuclear generated heat energy into non-electric applications that can facilitate combined heat and power operations by advanced nuclear reactor systems? This research is a composition of case studies showing preliminary conceptual designs for thermal delivery systems integrating advanced nuclear systems with a few industrial systems including high temperature steam electrolysis, a reference oil refinery, and potential future methanol systems that supplant some natural gas use with nuclear energy. Piping and instrumentation diagrams have been developed to show the conceptual integration of nuclear systems with representative industrial systems. Different features of the configurations are dependent on the specific integration requirements including energy source conditions, demand quantity, and require energy application conditions. Design concepts are validated using thermodynamic balance calculations to verify system performance including calculating system losses during transport. Key components: pumps and compressors, heat exchangers, and network piping are reported with key design information and sizing.
This presentation presents the oil refinery requirements and conditions needed for the steam, the integration of the oil refinery with a small modular reactor light water reactor (LWR) and small modular reactor high temperature gas reactor (HTGR), and the carbon avoided by replacing the currently utilized natural gas with nuclear energy.
Efforts to identify the most-economic methods to decarbonize several sectors of the U.S. economy are underway. Industrial processes such as crude-oil refining rely heavily on energy-dense and easily stored and transported fossil fuels for powering their operations. Refineries use large amounts of energy, primarily derived from fossil sources to separate crude-oil components, break down heavier hydrocarbons into lighter compounds, remove impurities, reform hydrocarbon molecules, and generate steam and electricity for pumps and compressors and other various auxiliary systems. Crude-oil refining operations such as distillation, cracking, desulfurization, reforming, utilities systems and some offsite facilities collectively account for most of the energy consumption. Other operations such as hydrocracking or hydrotreating also require hydrogen for developing hydrogenation reactions which involve substantial heating to keep the reactors at high-temperature and pressure levels. All heat and energy demands are typically provided by natural gas (NG), oil, or other fuels, which makes refinery industry one of the most-difficult sectors to decarbonize. Nuclear power is a viable and energy-dense source of clean electricity, heat, and hydrogen to provide the large, sustainable energy supply that the refining industry demands. The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Integrated Energy Systems (IES) program is working to perform research and development, design, economic siting, and risk analysis. This state-of-the-art work will enable the first on-site demonstrations and commercial deployments of advanced small modular nuclear reactors (SMNRs) integrated with industries such as chemical production, refining, iron and steel making, and more. IES seeks to demonstrate the ability of advanced nuclear reactors to meet the heat and power demands of these industries while reducing carbon emissions in a sustainable and cost-competitive way. The primary objective of this research effort is to analyze industrial-scale SMNR integration intended to decarbonize refining facilities. The foreseen outcome is the provision of reliable, cost-competitive, and sustainable clean energy, alongside a reduction of carbon emissions. Specifically, the focus of this work lies on meeting the reference facilities’ heat and electricity demands with nuclear power while also supplying clean hydrogen via integrated high-temperature steam electrolysis (HTSE). This report presents a comprehensive technical and economic assessment of the integration of advanced nuclear reactors into a reference refinery, leveraging financial incentives from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). The evaluation aims to explore the potential economic benefits and challenges associated with incorporating advanced nuclear reactors into refinery operations, particularly in terms of energy efficiency, economic implications and environmental impact. By examining both the technical feasibility and economic viability, this analysis seeks to identify existing gaps and propose solutions for successful nuclear integration implementation. The findings are intended to provide valuable insights for stakeholders considering the adoption of advanced nuclear reactors in the refining sector. A refinery reference-plant was developed, using an open-source refinery model, Petroleum Refinery Lifecycle Inventory Model (PRELIM) and expert assessment, as a base case for comparison with various nuclear integration options. The capacity of 100 kbd/day (KBD) of heavy crude-oil feed was selected to represent a general coking-type refinery with deep conversion capabilities (incorporating heavy-oil upgrading with FCC, coking, and associated hydrotreating process units), using a heavy crude-oil feed, which represents about 70% of U.S. refineries configurations. A summary of all cases considered in this study is shown in Table 1.
The growth of the aviation industry coupled with its dependence on energy dense, liquid fuels has brought sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) research to the forefront of the biofuels community. Petroleum refineries will need to decide how to satisfy the projected increase in jet fuel demand with either capital investments to debottleneck current operations or by integrating bio-blendstocks. This work seeks to compare jet production strategies on a risk-adjusted, economic performance basis using Monte-Carlo simulation and refinery optimization models. Additionally, incentive structures aiming to de-risk initial SAF production from the refiner’s perspective are explored. Results show that market sensitive incentives can reduce the financial risks associated with producing SAFs and deliver marginal abatement costs ranging between 136-182 $/Ton-CO2e.
The carbon present in biomass (the largest renewable source on the planet) continues to tempt us as a possible replacement for the carbon we currently obtain from fossil fuels. As we have recently reviewed, the challenges of extracting chemically useful feedstocks from biorenewables, and, especially, cellulosics, is largely under-developed relative to the maturity of the technologies for deriving industrially useful chemicals from petroleum. This ultimately boils down to problems in functionalization catalysis (for oil) versus defunctionalization (for cellulosics). The technology gap for achieving the selective defunctionalization of cellulosic feedstocks is much larger than it is for petroleum functionalization. This assessment suggests that the problem is not that bio-renewable feedstocks are fundamentally flawed from an economic and chemical sustainability perspective, but that we lack the technologies for deoxygenating cellulosic to more valuable chemicals. Bozell and Petersen have argued that integrated biorefineries will require a suite of products for viability (in analogy to an integrated petroleum refinery). These products will range from low-value high-volume energy related products (i.e. fuels) to high-value low-volume compounds focused on specialty markets and pharmaceuticals. The latter, although less impactful in terms of volume, is a critical economic component of the future integrated biorefinery. Our review was stimulated by their assessment of the state of the biorefinery and focused on the available chemistries for achieving low-volume high-value outcomes. To help fill this technology gap, we seek new catalytic technologies for synthesizing high-value chemicals from cellulosics and take the view that the inherent chirality of C 6 O 6 feedstocks will provide valuable materials for specialty and pharmaceutical applications, but only if one can achieve site-selective reactions that don’t denude the stereochemistry inherent to the sugars. Eliminative methods are less desirable as this deoxygenation scheme removes multiple stereocenters. The research plan outlined herein seeks methods for site-selective deoxygenation reactions that lead to high value specialty/pharma products.
The atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) accumulation (2–2.5 ppmv/year) is the result of the enormous gap between its emissions (37 Gton/year) and its capture, storage, and utilization (<500 Mton/year). Climate has been dramatically affected due to the failure of natural sinks, in working effectively. To address this Gton-scale gap, numerous uses and applications are needed particularly, those consuming vast volumes of this compound and/or rendering longevous products or long lifecycle services. Thus, carbon utilization (CU) can be seen as the step to close the carbon cycle. Among CU, R&D on CO 2 chemical conversion has proposed a variety of processes, with different degrees of developmental maturity. These chemical process technologies could be efficiently and effectively integrated into refineries to upgrade emitted CO 2 . A technology pipeline consisting of a database of these processes and the technology market status should be defined based on published scientific results and patents. Then, an innovative top-down methodology is proposed to eco-design configurations of that refinery, to warrant a sustainable carbon cycle (in terms of energy, environment, and economy) and to change the ways of producing fuels, chemicals, and materials. Additionally, the proposed methodology could be used to identify research and development gaps and needs, for orienting science and technology investments and measures. Hopefully, sustainable CO 2 refineries will be implemented to close the carbon cycle of a circular C-based economy and underpin a decarbonized chemical industry.
U.S. Gulf Coast refineries have processing capacity of approximately 9.4 million barrels of crude oil per day—about 50% of U.S. national capacity—while consuming natural gas, electricity, and hydrogen, resulting in approximately 100 million metric tonnes (MMT) of onsite CO₂ emissions in 2022. This study evaluates two alternative refinery energy supply pathways: nuclear energy (NE) and fossil energy-derived hydrogen with carbon capture and sequestration (FE-CCS; autothermal reforming), intermittent renewable sources are not considered as they cannot reliably meet continuous industrial heat and hydrogen demands. Using publicly available data for refineries, we conducted a bottom-up, facility-level assessment to estimate energy use by type, well-to-gate refinery emissions, and associated costs of integration. Compared to current refinery operations using natural gas energy supply and conventional hydrogen production (steam methane reforming without sequestration), NE and FE-CCS could produce, respectively, average emissions reductions of 37% and 42%, total abatement costs of $\$$52–$\$$221 and $\$$211–$\$$612/MT CO₂, and additional costs of about $\$$0.2–$\$$6 and $\$$3–$\$$11 per barrel of crude, respectively. Our analysis indicates that 25 out of 27 refineries have lower total additional cost ($\$$/bbl.) for the NE scenario than the FE-CCS scenario, making a strong case for NE integration with petroleum refineries. This work's main contribution is a detailed bottom-up refinery-level analysis method that can be utilized by the worldwide refining industry and stakeholders as they assess different technological options, along with their costs and environmental impacts for a specific refinery operation.
To mitigate green-house gas (GHG) emissions, governments around the world are enacting legislation to reduce carbon intensity in transportation fuels. Coprocessing biomass and petroleum-derived liquids in existing refineries is a near-term, cost-effective approach for introducing renewable carbon in fuels and enabling refineries to meet regulatory mandates. However, coprocessing biomass-derived liquids in refineries results in variable degrees of biogenic carbon incorporation, necessitating accurate quantification to verify compliance with mandates. Existing refinery control and instrumentation systems lack the means to measure renewable carbon accurately, reliably, and quickly. Furthermore, accurate measurement of biogenic carbon is key to ensuring refineries meet regulatory mandates. In this Perspective, we present existing methods for measuring biogenic carbon, point out their challenges, and discuss the need for new online analytical capabilities to measure biogenic carbon in fuel intermediates.
NREL's Economic, Sustainability, and Market Analysis (ESMA) team develops process models in Aspen Plus to support techno-economic analysis (TEA) and life-cycle assessment (LCA) of conversion pathways from renewable and circular resources to fuels and chemicals. These tools are being applied to assess probable operational constraints or bottlenecks associated with refinery co-processing and repurposing opportunities. The team also utilizes optimizable refinery models to quantify opportunities for biofuel and bioproduct pathways through integration with existing refining infrastructure. The goals of analysis are to model the transition of refineries to renewable and circular feedstocks and quantify the costs production and CO2 abatement through utilization of existing refineries. At the core of the ESMA team's work is the process data derived from conversion experiments on hydroprocessing and fluid catalytic cracking performed at NREL. The objective of this presentation is to highlight new analysis approaches and capabilities in pathway analysis and refinery optimization modeling with specific emphasis on integration of experimental data.