Catalytic Hydroprocessing of Single-Cell Oils to Hydrocarbon Fuels: Converting microbial lipids to fuels is a promising approach to replace fossil fuels

Abstract

Microbial lipids hold great promise as biofuel precursors, and research efforts to convert such lipids to renewable diesel fuels have been increasing in recent years. In contrast to the numerous literature reviews on growing, characterising and extracting lipids from oleaginous microbes, and on converting vegetable oils to hydrocarbon fuels, this review aims to provide insight into aspects that are specific to hydroprocessing microbial lipids. While standard hydrotreating catalysts generally perform well with terrestrial oils, differences in lipid speciation and the presence of co-extracted compounds, such as chlorophyll and sterols, introduce additional complexities into the process for microbial lipids. Lipid cleanup steps can be introduced to produce suitable feedstocks for catalytic upgrading.