CLEAN.PETROLEUM: New Biocatalysts for Green Crude Oil Desulfurization

Project funded by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P. (FCT) (Concurso para Financiamento de Projetos de Investigação Científica e Desenvolvimento Tecnológico em Todos os Domínios Ci), grant PTDC/QUI-QFI/28714/2017. Funded amount: EUR 239,815, as stated by the source. Runs 2018-10-01 to 2022-09-30. Keywords: Enzymatic Catalysis, Molecular Modeling, Quantum Chemistry, X-ray Crystallography, Exact sciences. Source: OpenAIRE Graph, from the funder's project data (collected by OpenAIRE on 2026-07-23); national funding data, not CORDIS; selected because its keywords name quantum. Abstract given by the source: THE PROBLEM Petroleum (crude oil) contains a vast amount of sulfur [1], causing corrosion in refinery equipment [2, 3] and SO2 emissions, which give rise to acid rain and adverse respiratory effects on man [3, 4]. As a result, strict restrictions to the sulfur content in fuels have been put in place [3]. The standard desulfurization technology is HYDROdesulfurization. It runs at high temperature (200-425 °C) and pressure (150-250 psi), and it is not very efficient for producing ultra-low sulfur fuels, due to the difficulty in removing sulfur from dibenzothiophenes (DBTs), which represent ~60 % of the total sulfur content. It also produces H2S, a toxic and corrosive gas [3, 5, 6], and massive CO2 emissions [7]. The cost of HYDROdesulfurization of diesel fuel reaches tens of billions of dollars per year worldwide [8]. A replacement is deemed needed. THE GOAL AND THE VISION BIOdesulfurization, which employs bacteria to clean sulfur, is nowadays the best alternative to HYDROdesulfurization. It is much less expensive [8] and drastically reduces CO2 emissions [3]. However, it is not ready for technology transfer because it is still too slow for industrial standards. The goal and vision of this project is to improve the BIOdesulfurization performance to meet the standards of oil refinery plants. The long-term vision is to replace a part of the HYDROdesulfurization process by BIOdesulfurization, in the petroleum refinery industry. THE STRATEGY BIOdesulfurization employs bacteria that use DBTs as source of sulfur through the ?4S metabolic pathway? (details in Fig. 1 - see attachments) [3, 5, 9]. It involves four enzymes working at room temperature and pressure [10]. We want to improve the 4S pathway through a coupled computational/experimental methodology. In the past we have used high-level quantum mechanics to predict enzymatic mechanisms [11-14] and the origin of the enzymes catalytic power [15]. We will use now that knowledge to improve the 4S metabolic pathway. X-ray [shortened; the full text is on the OpenAIRE page]

Original source.

Source: OpenAIRE Graph: projects of national funders, OpenAIRE, from the project data of Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P. (FCT). Retrieved 2026-10-28. Licence: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (OpenAIRE Graph). Selected metadata, adapted presentation; the publisher's record is authoritative. No endorsement by the source is implied. Licence: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0).

AI-assisted summary: The CLEAN.PETROLEUM project, funded by FCT with EUR 239,815, focuses on developing biocatalysts for green crude oil desulfurization from 2018 to 2022. It addresses sulfur removal from petroleum to reduce environmental impacts and improve fuel quality. Suggested technology pillar: enabling. Generated by AI from the public source text; it may contain errors and the original source is authoritative.