One Step and Sustainable Production of Biofuels from Biomass: Empowered by Catalytic Hydrothermal Liquefaction

 

2024-2025 USDA-NIFA Limited Competitive Research Support Award

 

Principal Investigators and Affiliations:

PI: Dr. Hong Je Cho, Oklahoma State University

Graduate Student: Mohd Tauhid Khan

Funded: $89,600

Start Date: 10/1/2024

End Date: 6/30/2025

 

Project Goal

The overarching goal of this project is to create innovative strategies for producing biofuels from biomass through biphasic catalysis-driven, one-step hydrothermal liquefaction (HTL) in a single pot and to demonstrate the proposed process intensification concepts by using spent coffee grounds (SCG) with tailored EAM/zeolite catalysts. 

 

Objectives

1. Synthesize acid zeolite-supported EAM catalysts. 
2. Characterize prepared catalysts by multiple characterization techniques.
3. Investigate catalytic performance for SCG HTL in biphasic catalysis.

 

Expected Project Outcomes

This project will provide economically viable, sustainable and general strategies to produce biofuels from biomass via process-intensified, one-step HTL routes. This study will establish crucial relationships between catalyst structure-property and its reactivity, verify the proposed hypothesis, elucidate the roles of catalysts and solvents, and demystify the impacts of reaction parameters on catalytic performance. Incorporating SCG into this research will mitigate SCG waste management and global warming issues. Due to the feedstock flexibility of HTL, knowledge and understanding acquired from this project with SCG will be applicable to other types of biomass/agricultural waste. Fundamental insights obtained from this project will also have broad applications across various fields, such as bioenergy, bio-products, biofuels, biomass waste treatment, sustainability, process intensification, and heterogeneous catalysis. This foundational research will open up new pathways in the realm of biofuel production from biomass.