KiOR’s Columbus, Mississippi, 500 ton dry biomass per day commercial plant, with the single-reactor riser tower at center.
KiOR’s Single-Reactor Thermocatalytic Biomass Conversion Process. KiOR employed the same basic process design for gram-scale lab-testing equipment, kilograms-per-hour pilot plants, a 10 ton-per-day semiworks/demonstration unit, and 500 ton-per-day commercial biomass-to-fuels plant. In this system, a traditional FCC-type catalyst is added to the biomass feed and the mixture passed through a single vertical riser with proprietary variable geometry capable of providing a residence time for the solid particles of 20-50 seconds and bio-oil vapor residence time of less than 1.5 seconds. A stripper separates entrained vapors with steam from the spent catalyst (containing coke and char) with the crude bio-oil further processed to prepare it for upgrading in typical refinery processes. Some components such as cyclones to separate vapor from solids, vapor and process gas filters, heat-collection vessels, and heat-exchangers are not shown. The single-reactor process produced uneconomical low yields of highly oxygenated bio-oil because biomass conversion by-products (acidic water vapor) led to high catalyst deactivation and the need for frequent catalyst replacement
