Pyrolysis Bio-Oil Esterfication

I believe that fermentation is based on the sugar content, of which bio-Oil has very little.

Well I was thinking of cellulosic waste which I believe is composed of pentose, cellulose(of course), and lignin...It's my understanding that the fast Pyrolysis process breaks these down, which I would think would produce an oil high in sugars...I also have heard that the oil is acidic....The idea of esterfication would be to make the Bio-Oil mixable with current fossil fuels...

here's a couple of useful links for this discussion

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrolysis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syngas

It would seem to be a better solution than cellulosic ethanol for switchgrass

For most esterification processes, one needs an acid and an alcohol (glycol, etc). Thus, ethyl acetate is an ester of ethyl alcohol and acetic acid. When the two reactants are both difunctional, one can create polymeric esters, such as poly(ethylene terephthalate), (Dacron, PET, etc). One can use direct esterification or trans-esterification reactions to product esters.

note that idea of pyrolysis-oil fermentation is a well established proposal:

idea is to de-ash biomass , by a wash with dilute acid water (iipH=1-2), hydrolyze hemicellulose (easy to do with mild conditions), then pyrolyze the residue (cellulose+lignin), and produce a bio-oil rich in levoglucosan and sugar oligomers (thanks to de-ashing). the bio-oil is splitted in two phases (organic and water soluble) and water phase is hydrolized with solid acid reusable catalyst (for hydrolysis of levoglosan and sugar oligomers in glucose) and passed on activate charcoal.

despite to complexity this configuration demonstrated cost comparabe with that of actual ligno-cellulosic, thanks to the eliminato of the bottle neck of cellulose hydroliti split. Dott. Robert C. Brown had studied this routes extensively

consider that recent works demonstrated the feasebility of levoglucosan (not considering oligomers )production of 70% respect to starting pure cellulose (and each moles of levoglucosan give 1.14 moles of glucose).