The presence of certain components in petroleum and petroleum derived fuels can prevent or limit their use in combustion processes due to operational or regulatory limitations. For instance, the level of sulfur in available fuels can limit the size of a power generation installation due to emissions constraints. In addition, the presence of vanadium impurities can cause corrosion of gas turbine blades.
Selectively removing undesirable components from fuels before their combustion can allow their use in previously inaccessible applications. Currently used refinery technologies including hydrodemetallation and hydrodesulfurization are designed for the extraction of light fractions, and use of these processes is costly, especially in small scale applications.
Sorbent technology, in which fuel is contacted with a solid material capable of selectively adsorbing or absorbing contaminants are an alternative to traditional, capital-intensive refinery processes which rely on fractional distillation, hydrotreating, catalytic cracking, etc.
While sorbent processes can provide advantages over refinery processes, they can be limited by the availability of only a narrow window of intrinsic surface properties of the sorbent, such as polarity, pH, or wettability. It is therefore desirable to have a sorbent that comprises a greater range of properties and an increased ability to remove undesirable components, while retaining the overall structural features of the sorbent.