Catalytic Steam Reforming of Toluene for Hydrogen Production over Nickel-Cobalt Supported Activated Carbon

Abstract

Global energy supply is almost entirely dependent on fossil fuels such as oil, coal and natural gas [1]. Thus, utilization of non-renewable resources has led to a significant increase of greenhouse gas emission affecting the environment due to climate change. Therefore, reduction of global warming impact has driven the attention towards utilizing renewable source of energy, including biomass [2]. Synthesis gas (syngas), a mixture of primarily carbon monoxide (CO) and hydrogen (H2) has been seen as a promising energy source to replace conventional fossil fuelbased energy. Syngas can also be utilized as an alternative to natural gas fuel for power or H2 production. Compared to fossil fuel, biomass has significant advantages such as abundantly available, inexhaustibility, renewability, carbonneutrality and low sulfur content. The syngas can also be used further as a feedstock for the production of hydrocarbon fuels via the Fischer-Tropsch synthesis (FTS) process. However, biomass-based syngas contains high concentration of tars byproducts, which represent a mixture of several aromatic compounds, that prevents the syngas from direct use and requires an effective tar removal approach. It is essential to remove tar content prior to syngas utilization because the inevitable tars-byproduct causes clogging of lines and heat exchangers as well as catalyst deactivation due to coke formation [3]. Tar formation poses as the greatest hurdles of successful implementation of biomass gasification technologies in a commercial scale. Hence, the removal of tar in biomass gasification is highly desirable. Catalytic steam reforming (SR) of tar is one of the most promising technique because of its high conversion efficiency for hydrogen production [4]. Additionally, catalytic SR of tars is able to increase syngas production where it

Assessment of Agricultural Residue to Produce Activated Carbon-Supported Nickel Catalysts and Hydrogen Rich Gas

“…Governments around the world are implementing policies and measures for greening hydrogen production [1]. Clean hydrogen can be generated from fossil fuels with carbon capture, biomass, or water, through thermal, electrolytic, or photolytic processes [2][3][4]. Biomass can be used to produce hydrogen through industrial processes that have already been commercially deployed for fossil feedstocks, and can be a complementary and reliable backup source of renewable hydrogen for the hydrogen produced by electrolysis using solar or wind energies [5].…”