Abrar Inayat, Murni M. Ahmad, Suzana Yusup, M. I. Abdul Mutalib, and Zakir Khan

Contents

19.1 Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 330

19.2 Steam Gasification for Hydrogen Production……………………………………………………………. 331

19.3 Steam Gasification with In Situ CO2 Capture for Hydrogen Production…………………… 332

19.4 Catalytic Steam Gasification for Hydrogen Production………………………………………………… 335

19.5 EFB Gasification for Hydrogen Production……………………………………………………………… 336

19.6 Kinetics Modeling for Hydrogen Production via Biomass Gasification…………………………. 336

19.6.1 Kinetics Modeling Along with Kinetics Parameters Determination……………………… 338

19.7 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………………… 340

References…………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 341

Abstract The production of hydrogen as a clean and sustainable fuel is becoming attractive due to the energy crisis and increasing environmental issues associated with fossil fuel usage. Biomass steam gasification with in situ carbon dioxide cap­ture has good prospects for the production of hydrogen-rich gas. Furthermore, hydrogen yield can be enhanced using catalyst steam gasification. This chapter comprises the literature review on both the approaches, i. e., experimental and mod­eling used to study the hydrogen production from biomass gasification specifically using pure steam as gasification agent. There were several modeling approaches for

A. Inayat (*) • S. Yusup • M. I.A. Mutalib

Department of Chemical Engineering, Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS,

31750 Tronoh, Perak, Malaysia e-mail: abrar. inayat@petronas. com

M. M. Ahmad

Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS, 31750 Tronoh, Perak, Malaysia Z. Khan

Department of Chemical Engineering, COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, 54000 Lahore, Pakistan

K. R. Hakeem et al. (eds.), Biomass and Bioenergy: Processing and Properties,

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-07641-6_19, © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014 gasification process based on the kinetics, equilibrium, and the fluid dynamics behaviors. A detailed discussion has been carried out in this chapter on modeling and simulation for hydrogen production from biomass based on kinetics modeling. Experimental studies have been published on steam gasification and steam gasifica­tion with CO2 capture and catalytic steam gasification has been discussed. Gasification for hydrogen production from oil palm empty fruit bunch has also been discussed.

Keywords Biomass • Steam gasification • CO2 capture • Hydrogen • Kinetics modeling

19.1 Introduction

Hydrogen is one of the potential alternative energy sources that could be used to replace the existing fossil fuels. Besides the zero carbon footprints, hydrogen is expected to become a prominent energy carrier for stationary and mobile power generation applications such as in transport, industrial, commercial, and residential applications (Clark Ii and Rifkin 2006; Solomon and Banerjee 2006). The utiliza­tion of renewable sources including the biomass of forestry, agricultural, and municipal waste has become a new source of energy due to the abundance of these wastes. Consequently, producing hydrogen from biomass not only offers a zero net carbon emission and burning to get electricity and heat which is clean, it can also be stored and transported and be used in existing technology and infrastructure (Jacobson 2009). Biomass gasification is considered as one of the potential alterna­tives for the production of hydrogen, but the quality of hydrogen and product gas varies with the different gasification agents used (Holladay et al. 2009; Kalinci et al. 2009; Kumar et al. 2009). Biomass gasification can be performed using different gasification agents such as air, air-steam and oxygen-steam mixtures, or pure steam. It is reported that the use of pure steam is more economical and in favor of producing more hydrogen yield compared to the other conventional gasification agents (Gil et al. 1999; Balat 2008; Corella et al. 2008a, b; Balat et al. 2009). This chapter comprises the literature review on both the approaches, i. e., experi­mental and modeling used to study the hydrogen production from biomass steam gasification. Studies have been published on steam gasification (Ptasinski 2008) and steam gasification with CO2 capture (Florin and Harris 2008) and catalytic steam gasification has been discussed (Guo et al. 2010; Tanksale et al. 2010; Serrano-Ruiz and Dumesic 2011). Furthermore, the availability of palm oil empty fruit bunch (EFB) is abundant in Malaysia (Sumathi et al. 2008; Mohammed et al. 2011a, b), so the work reported on EFB gasification for hydrogen production has also been dis­cussed. There were several modeling approaches for gasification process based on the kinetics, equilibrium, and the fluid dynamics behaviors (Nemtsov and Zabaniotou 2008; Wang and Yan 2008; Gomez-Barea and Leckner 2010; Puig-Arnavat et al. 2010; Ahmed et al. 2012; Guo et al. 2012). A detailed discussion has been carried out in this chapter on modeling and simulation for hydrogen production from biomass based on kinetics modeling. Finally, chapter comprises a short summary to identify the gap of study in the specific fields.