This paper discusses the techno-economic assessment of hydrogen production from biogas with conventional systems. The work is part of the European project BIONICO, whose purpose is to develop and test a membrane reactor (MR) for hydrogen production from biogas. Within the BIONICO project, steam reforming (SR) and autothermal reforming (ATR), have been identified as well-known technologies for hydrogen production from biogas. Two biogases were examined: one produced by landfill and the other one by anaerobic digester. The purification unit required in the conventional plants has been studied and modeled in detail, using Aspen Adsorption. A pressure swing adsorption system (PSA) with two and four beds and a vacuum PSA (VPSA) made of four beds are compared. VPSA operates at sub-atmospheric pressure, thus increasing the recovery: results of the simulations show that the performances strongly depend on the design choices and on the gas feeding the purification unit. The best purity and recovery values were obtained with the VPSA system, which achieves a recovery between 50% and 60% at a vacuum pressure of 0.1 bar and a hydrogen purity of 99.999%. The SR and ATR plants were designed in Aspen Plus, integrating the studied VPSA model, and analyzing the behavior of the systems at the variation of the pressure and the type of input biogas. The SR system achieves a maximum efficiency, calculated on the LHV, of 52% at 12 bar, while the ATR of 28% at 18 bar. The economic analysis determined a hydrogen production cost of around 5 €/kg of hydrogen for the SR case.

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Small scale power generation, focusing on the field of Proton Exchange Membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) based systems, are potentially characterized by high net electric efficiency and very low emissions targeting the application to distributed heat and power co-generation (CHP) in the urban areas. As drawback, these systems implies the adoption of fuel processor to produce pure hydrogen upstream the fuel cell. Natural gas (NG), with the most widespread network in industrialized countries, is the reference fuel for hydrogen production. So in the last years many studies have been focused on the integration of membrane reactor in micro-CHP system thanks to its unique feature of separating pure hydrogen. Since the heat and electric demand from a residential user can be lower than rated power output, this work deals with the system performances at partial loads assessing the impact of different European NG composition.

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