Hydrogen Production from Biomass Gasification with Ni-Fe/Al Catalysts

Producing clean hydrogen from renewable resources will reduce our dependence on using fossil fuels towards a green and sustainable future. Biomass gasification is regarded as a promising technology for hydrogen production. In this work, low cost Ni-based catalyst was applied in a two-stage fixed bed reaction system. Fe was added into Ni-Al catalyst(80mol.% Al) by co-precipitation method with various Ni:Fe molar ratios of 9:1, 8:2, 6:4, 5:5, 4:6, 2:8 and 1:9. The catalysts were characterized with N2 adsorption isotherms, X-ray diffraction(XRD), scanning electron microscopy(SEM), temperature-programmed reduction(TPR) and oxidation(TPO). The Ni-Fe/Al(9:1) catalyst showed the best catalytic activity during the gasification of wood biomass. The gas production was increased from 33.0 to 62.8wt.% and hydrogen production was increased from 2.4 to 11.4(mmolH2 g -1 wood), CH4 composition decreased from 14.8 to 6.2vol.% and C2-C4 composition decreased from 7.8 to 1.2vol.% when Ni-Fe/Al(9:1) was added in the experiment. In addition, more than 40vol.% CO was also produced which is valuable as syngas for the downstream process. Furthermore, less than 3wt.% coke was generated in this work, which was negligible. Keywords-Biomass; Pyrolysis; Gasification; Ni-Fe/Al catalyst; Two-stage fixed bed reactor