Catalytic pyrolysis of exhausted olive oil waste

The interest on energy recovery from renewable sources is increasing due to the global warming and fossil fuels limitation. Biomass thermochemical conversion methods present some significant advantages such as zero net emissions and the use of agricultural by-products. In this work, a study of the catalytic and non-catalytic pyrolysis of an exhausted olive waste was carried out. The objective was to characterize the solid, liquid and gaseous phases in terms of their energy content. Two experimental series were conducted: uncatalyzed processes, studying the influence of temperature in the range 400–900 °C; and catalyzed ones, investigating the influence of temperature (500–800 °C) and quantity of catalyst (0–100 g). Also, the dolomite effectiveness as catalyst was evaluated. For this motive, consecutive experiments, without reactivating dolomite, were carried out (0–6 runs), and the yields of solids, liquids and gases were determined. It was found that increasing temperature leads in both series to a decrease in the solid and liquid yields and to an increase in the gas yield. The presence and amount of catalyst caused a significant decrease in the liquid phase yield and a high increase in the gas phase yield giving rise to a vast rise in hydrogen production. On the other hand, the catalyst proved to be stable and did not lose activity during at least six pyrolysis cycles.Finally, as a previous step to the design of industrial installations, a kinetic study of the process was performed, based on the generation of the principal gases, considering that these are formed through parallel independent first-order reactions, with different activation energy.