Page 155 - Advances in bioenergy (2016)

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Biomass Gasification for Synthesis Gas Production and

Applications of the Syngas

2
1*
Reinhard Rauch, Jitka Hrbek and Hermann Hofbauer 2
1 Bioenergy 2020+, Güssing, Austria
2 Institute of Chemical Engineering, Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria

SPIRIT AND PURPOSE OF BIOMASS GASIFICATION

FOR SYNTHESIS GAS PRODUCTION

Synthesis gas is one important intermediate to produce fuels for transportation and chemicals.
Currently, synthesis gas is produced mainly from natural gas, coal or by-products from
refineries. The usage of synthesis gas is about 50% to ammonia, 25% to hydrogen, and the rest

is to methanol, Fischer-Tropsch (FT) products and others. 1,2

Owing to the global warming problem caused by fossil CO emissions, and also due to issues
2
related to security of energy supply, much R&D on the production of synthesis gas from
biomass was carried out in the past decade. The main investigated applications of the synthesis
gas was to produce transportation fuels over FT synthesis, methanol synthesis or others, like
mixed alcohol synthesis.

TECHNOLOGIES FOR PRODUCTION OF SYNTHESIS

GAS FROM BIOMASS

In the past decades much R&D was done to develop special gasification systems to convert
biomass to synthesis gas, or to adapt coal gasification technology for biomass. These systems
can be divided into several groups according to Ref 3:

Producing and transport of the heat into the gasification reactor: allothermal-autothermal

Type of reactor: fixed bed-fluidized bed-entrained flow

Type of gasification agent: oxygen-steam-mixtures of steam and oxygen

Allothermal–Autothermal

Autothermal gasifiers provide the necessary heat of reaction by means of partial oxidation
within the gasification reactor. If air is used as oxidizing agent during the process, the product
gas contains a high amount of nitrogen. So for synthesis gas production either pure oxygen (in
entrained flow reactors) or mixtures of oxygen and steam (in fluidized bed reactors) are used