A Technical and Environmental Evaluation of Six Routes for Industrial Hydrogen Production from Empty Palm Fruit Bunches

Abstract

Currently, the production of alternative fuels from renewable sources such as biomass has been increased in order to meet energy policies and reduce the environmental impacts of fossil fuels. This work is focused on hydrogen production from oil palm empty fruit bunches using different biomass gasification methods (direct gasification, indirect gasification, and supercritical water gasification) and purification technologies (selexol-based absorption and pressure swing adsorption). Six routes were selected based on these technologies and simulated using Aspen Plus software. Possible operating process improvements were suggested based on parametric sensitivity analysis by studying the effect of several variables on hydrogen production: gasification temperature, gasifying agent-to-biomass ratio, steam-to-carbon monoxide ratio, temperature of a high-temperature step reactor, and pressure in a hydrogen purification unit. The methodology of waste reduction algorithm was performed to assess the environmental impacts of each route. Results showed that hydrogen production was improved by increasing the gasification reaction temperature to 900 °C, oxygen-to-biomass ratio to 1.5, and pressure of purification stage to 10 atm for all routes. However, routes 1 and 2 presented a slight increase up to 0.7% in hydrogen yield using 1.5 mol O2/mol biomass. The environmental assessment revealed that routes 3 and 4 exhibited the lowest toxicological and atmospheric environmental impacts because of the use of char generated in the gasification reaction for energy production. These results indicated that route 4 exhibited the best performance for producing hydrogen from an environmental viewpoint.

Seashell waste-derived materials for secondary catalytic tar reduction in municipal solid waste gasification

“…• C for the catalytic and non-catalytic cases, which agrees with what is expected from a temperature increment[71,72,73]. The use of catalyst #1 however, resulted in a slightly higher volume fraction of H 2 when compared to the non-catalytic case, while the use of catalyst #2 decreased the H 2 volume fraction.…”

Development of renewable energy multi-energy complementary hydrogen energy system (A Case Study in China): A review

“…The domestic research on hydrogen production technology started relatively late, and there is less research on hydrogen production technology from renewable energy. In 2019, Vargas Mira et al (2019) analyzed the economics of hydrogen production technology, analysed several existing industrial hydrogen production technologies, and found that the economics of hydrogen production technology is closely related to the cost, location and scale of hydrogen production equipment. Jin et al (2019) proposed the use of hydrogen production technology to solve the problem of abandoning wind and solar from the consideration of the current cost, life and efficiency of hydrogen production.…”

Gasification of Psidium guajava L. Waste Using Supercritical Water: Evaluation of Feed Ratio and Moderate Temperatures

“…About experiments, fuel synthesis has been performed above critical temperature of water up to 1123 K in catalytic/non-catalytic batch or continuous flow reactors made of different materials. All these parameters are aimed to describe the reaction mechanism, look for the optimum operating conditions, and perform numerical simulation [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15].…”

“…For instance, lignocellulosic biomass is typically constituted by cellulose (45-50%), hemicellulose (20-25%) and lignin (20-25%). The reaction mechanism that induces water is complex at these conditions, as demonstrated elsewhere [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15]. Initially, biomass material conversion produces intermediates by hydrolysis and the water solvating power effect.…”