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Hydrogasification of Biomass For Cogeneration of Electricity and Synthetic Natural Gas
Hydrogasification of Biomass For Cogeneration of Electricity and Synthetic Natural Gas
Hydrogasification of Biomass For Cogeneration of Electricity and Synthetic Natural Gas
spazzafumo@unicas.it
Abstract
The infrastructure for transport and distribution of hydrogen, the fuel of choice for fuel cells, is currently lacking. In a short to medium term, efficient production of hydrogen from reforming of fuels that have existing infrastructure (e.g.
natural gas, gasoline or LPG) would remove a major drawback to use fuel cells for distributed power generation (energy conversion systems with power up to about 1 MW operating close to the final users).
In such a scenario, the use of renewable hydrogen, generated from renewable sources, to produce synthetic fuels can play an important role to overcome the disadvantages of renewable sources (i. e. dissimilarities between energy
availability and energy demand) and to achieve a satisfactory reduction and control of CO2 emissions.
In this paper we analysed the chemical section of an integrated system based on renewable hydrogen production and biomass hydrogasification process. The main product of the process is a substitute of natural gas. In order to define
the optimal operating conditions we carried out a sensitivity analysis by varying the sensible working parameters of the hydrogasification/methanation island such as hydrogen to biomass ratio, pressure, biomass humidity. The HHV of the
dry gas produced is around 88% of the total energy input (biomass+hydrogen).
Intr oduction
Dry syngas composition Dry SNG composition
Carbon dioxide emissions could be reduced either by improving the efficiency of the final use of energy or replacing
fossil fuels with renewable energy sources (RES). A problem of this second opportunity is that the current 100% 100%
technologies to convert RES mainly generate electric energy and the existing grids are not suitable to accept an
irregular power like that obtainable from RES. Moreover the final energy users requires more fuel than electric 80% 80%
energy. 60% 60%
Biomasses are more suitable to generate fuel, but they are not suitable to replace the current fuel need.
Hydrogen is a fuel and could be easily produced from electric energy generated from RES. For such a reason 40% 40%
hydrogen is considered the ideal solution. The bottleneck is hydrogen storage and distribution. So the exploitation of 20% 20%
RES will be limited until these issues will be solved.
A bridge solution to speed-up the utilisation of hydrogen from RES could be its conversion in other fuels, more 0% 0%
0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20
similar to the current used ones. That is to generate hydrocarbons. It requires carbon, not only hydrogen. And carbon
could be supplied by biomasses or fossil fuels. Using biomasses the resulting fuel would be renewable and carbon- biomass humidity [%] biomass humidity [%]
neutral. CH4 H2 CO2 CO CH4 H2 CO2 CO
The hydrocarbon produced could be liquid (e.g. methanol) or gaseous (e.g: methane). Methane is the main
component of natural gas which is normally distributed and used in most of buildings. Moreover the number of
vehicle using natural gas is gradually increasing. And different blends of methane and hydrogen could be distributed
utilising the existing natural gas pipelines and could be efficiently utilised in internal combustion engines. 3.0 800
Depending on the kind of biomass, a gasification process or a fermentation process can be used to generate a 700
gaseuous fuel. In any case the gas generated will contain mainly hydrogen and carbon oxides which could be 2.5
600
converted to water and methane by means of a methanation process.
temperature [°C]
2.0
heat 2.0
temperature [°C]
Low pressure is favourable to HHV of dry SNG which is 88.9% of the energy input for atmospheric conditions, while
high pressure is favourable to heat recovery as the temperature of the syngas and the heat flow from syngas cooler
increase.
2.5 800
700
2
600
CH4 H2 CO2 CO CH4 H2 CO2 CO
temperature [°C]
heat flow [MW]
1.5 500
400
A sensitivity analysis was carried out by varying the following parameters:
1 300
• biomass humidity;
• hydrogen/biomass ratio to the hydrogasifier; 200
0.5 Syngas Methanator & SNG
• operating pressure; Methanator Syngas SNG 100
• oxygen content of the biomass (leaving constant the C/H ratio). 0 0
The main effect of humidity is to decrease the amount of the other components of the biomass and the result is that a 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
lower amount of carbon is available to produce methane and carbon oxides. For such a reason the content of carbon pressure [bar] pressure [bar]
oxides in SNG decreases by a factor of 10 when humidity increases from 0% to 10%.
Humidity has a small influence on HHV of the dry gas which varies from 88% to 88.6% of the energy input, while
affects the heat recoverable increasing the heat available into the SNG and decreasing the heat available from syngas A variation of the oxygen content in the range ±5% did not show any significant change.
cooler and methanator. Also the temperature of the syngas decreases. Therefore we can say that humidity has a
negative effect on the heat recovery. Conclusion
We can conclude that the process has a very high chemical efficiency which shows small variations when varying
values of the operating parameters. This means that these values could be selected to optimise the operations of the
electrolyser and of the heat recovery section.