(680e) 12-Tricosanone Production from Lauric Acid for the Synthesis of Cellulosic Base Oils

Lubricants are an essential part of modern society with an over $146 billion market, but they have a significant environmental footprint. Bio lubricant base oils offer performance advantages over existing oils and mitigate environmental challenges. Recently, our center developed a strategy to synthesize performance-advantaged branched lubricant base oils from 12-tricosanone, obtained from bioderived fatty acid, and furfural, obtained from lignocellulosic biomass. The base oil has unmatched properties. Our approach serves as a potential stepping-stone to replace petroleum-derived base oils and, in turn, reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The synthesis of these novel bio-based branched lubricant base-oils involve two-steps, aldol condensation of furfural with 12-tricosanone followed by the hydrodeoxygenation reaction. A significant amount of data was presented in our publication. Towards scaling up the technology, the synthesis of the reactant 12-tricosanone from lauric acid has been achieved in excellent yields over a MgO catalyst. However, the developed synthesis method has limitations of long processing times, use of high boiling point solvent and these batch reactors cannot be easily scaled up. In the current work, we de-bottleneck this process by eliminating the solvent, shifting to a continuous flow reactor, and scaling up the process to kilogram scale production of 12-tricosanone with excellent selectivity. We also explore the economic and environmental impact of this process intensification through TEA and LCA simulations. The TEA results showed that these lubricant base-oils have less minimum selling price compared to the petroleum derived lubricants, paving the way for large-scale production of these bio-base oils.