Quantitative analysis of crude and stabilized bio-oils by comprehensive two-dimensional gas-chromatography

Bio-oils produced by fast pyrolysis of lignocellulosic biomass have proven to be a promising, clean, and renewable energy source. To better assess the potential of using bio-oils for the production of chemicals and fuels a new comprehensive characterization method is developed. The combination of the analyical power of GC × GC–FID and GC × GC–TOF-MS allows to obtain an unseen level of detail for both crude and hydrotreated bio-oils originated from pine wood biomass. The use of GC × GC proves to be essential to capture the compositional differences between crude and stabilized bio-oils. Our method uses a flame ionization detector to quantify the composition, while GC × GC–TOF-MS is used for the qualitative analysis. This method allows quantification of around 150 tentatively identified compounds, describing approximately 80% of total peak volume. The number of quantified compounds in bio-oils is increased with a factor five compared to the present state-of-the-arte. The necessity of using multiple internal standards (dibutyl ether and fluoranthene) and a cold-on column injector is also verified.