Intensification of a hydrotreating process to produce biojet fuel using thermally coupled distillation

Aviation sector contributes with 2% of the total CO2 emissions, and predictions estimate that air traffic will duplicate in the next 20 years. The development of aviation fuel from renewable feedstocks has been identified as the most promissory strategy to reduce CO2 emissions. Recently, a process to produce aviation fuel from renewable feedstock has been proposed, which converts vegetable oil through hydrogenating, deoxygenating, isomerization and selective hydrocracking to renewable fuels, which are purified later. In this work, we propose the intensification of the hydrotreating production process through the use of thermally coupled distillation for the purification stage; moreover, we incorporate a turbine in order to generate electricity with the energy contained in the outlet stream of the reactor. Also, the purification stage is optimized through a multiobjective genetic algorithm, coupled to a process simulator. Results show that the use of thermally coupled distillation reduces the energy requirements in the separation stage. Also, energy can be generated as a result of the conditioning of the stream that is fed to the distillation train. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.