Biomass Steam Gasification with In-Situ CO2 Capture for Enriched Hydrogen Gas Production: A Reaction Kinetics Modelling Approach

Due to energy and environmental issues, hydrogen has become a more attractive clean fuel. Furthermore, there is high interest in producing hydrogen from biomass with a view to sustainability. The thermochemical process for hydrogen production, i.e. gasification, is the focus of this work. This paper discusses the mathematical modeling of hydrogen production process via biomass steam gasification with calcium oxide as sorbent in a gasifier. A modelling framework consisting of kinetics models for char gasification, methanation, Boudouard, methane reforming, water gas shift and carbonation reactions to represent the gasification and CO2 adsorption in the gasifier, is developed and implemented in MATLAB. The scope of the work includes an investigation of the influence of the temperature, steam/biomass ratio and sorbent/biomass ratio on the amount of hydrogen produced, product gas compositions and carbon conversion. The importance of different reactions involved in the process is also discussed. It is observed that hydrogen production and carbon conversion increase with increasing temperature and steam/biomass ratio. The model predicts a maximum hydrogen mole fraction in the product gas of 0.81 occurring at 950 K, steam/biomass ratio of 3.0 and sorbent/biomass ratio of 1.0. In addition, at sorbent/biomass ratio of 1.52, purity of H-2 can be increased to 0.98 mole fraction with all CO2 present in the system adsorbed.