Simulation of Pyrolytic Bio-Oil Upgrading Into Hydrogen

Increasing world energy consumption, demand and price, along with the exhaustion of existing fossil fuel supply and environmental awareness by the early 1990s, new and renewable yet clean fuels such as hydrogen, are becoming popular alternatives to revamp the energy sources while maintaining sustainable,
economically viable and eco-friendly source. Biomass in the form of empty fruit bunch, offers advantages compared to other new renewable energy sources due to
its versatile potential and abundance, especially in Malaysia which is one of the main producers of world palm oil supply. One of the common processes to produce
hydrogen from biomass is via fast catalytic pyrolysis of biomass into bio-oil and steam reforming of bio-oil into hydrogen. The hydrogen yield from bio-oil can be
further increased via water gas shift conversion. This work aims to investigate feasible enhancement of bio-oil into hydrogen via steam reforming and water shift reaction using conceptual design and simulation approaches. iCON is used in this work as the simulation tool. In this simulation work, it is assumed that the major organic compounds existing in bio-oil are acetic acid, acetone, and ethylene glycol.
The operating temperatures and pressures for the steam reformer and shift reactor is 650C and 200C, respectively, and 1 and 17 bar, respectively. The steam to carbon ratio on molar basis used is 6.5. The overall conversion obtained for the process is 84%. We also compare our results with simulation work reported by Kinoshita et al. and the perimental data by Czernik et al. The preliminary economic potential obtained for the process developed is RM17.58  106/year i.e.USD 5.38  106/year.