Pure Hydrogen Production in Membrane Reactor with Mixed Reforming Reaction by Utilizing Waste Gas: A Case Study

A rise in CO2 and other greenhouse gases’ concentration from gas refinery flares and furnaces in the atmosphere causes environmental problems. In this work, a new process was designed to use waste gas (flue gas and flare gas) of a domestic gas refinery to produce pure hydrogen in a membrane reactor. In particular, the process foresees that the energy and CO2 content of flue gas can provide the heat of the mixed reforming reaction to convert flare gas into hydrogen. Furthermore, the characteristics of the feed stream were obtained via simulation. Then, an experimental setup was built up to investigate the performance of a membrane reactor allocating an unsupported dense Pd-Ag membrane at the mentioned conditions. In this regard, a Ni/CeO2 catalyst was loaded in the membrane reformer for mixed reforming reaction, operating at 450 ◦C, in a pressure range between 100 and 350 kPa and a gas hourly space velocity of around 1000 h−1. The experimental results in terms of methane conversion, hydrogen recovery and yield, as well as products’ compositions are reported. The best results of this work were observed at 350 kPa, where the MR was able to achieve about 64%, 52% and 50% for methane conversion, hydrogen yield and recovery, respectively. Furthermore, with the assistance of the experimental tests, the proposed process was simulated in the scaling up to calculate the needed surface area for MR in the domestic gas refinery.