Turning Goo to Fuel - Hydrothermal Liquefaction at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Instead of walloping the environment, WtE technologies can divert these wastes for beneficial energy use. The research team selected one WtE technology—hydrothermal liquefaction, or HTL—for their analysis. HTL mimics the geological conditions the Earth uses to create crude oil, using high pressure and temperature to achieve in minutes what has typically taken millions of years. The resulting material is similar to petroleum pumped out of the ground, but also contains small amounts of water and oxygen. We have demonstrated that biocrudes from wastewater sludge, algae, and a few other wet wastes can be refined using conventional petroleum refining operations. The technique has a number of advantages over other thermochemical conversion methods. It works best with wet biomass. It has the ability to transform almost all of the biomass into biocrude oil. It also offers opportunities to recover nutrients such as phosphorous.