Comparative Analysis of Synthetic Natural Gas versus Hydrogen Production from Bagasse

Abstract

The present study makes a rigorous and comparative evaluation of two biomass to gases (BtG) conversion routes and according to this outcome, suggests which of the options evaluated is most desirable. These options, the hydrogen and synthetic natural gas (SNG) production, were designed in Aspen plus process simulation software. Sugar cane bagasse, the waste solid residue of the sugar cane milling process, was considered as feedstock at a flowrate of 100 t h -1. Mass and energy balance data were extracted from the simulations, and consequently thermodynamic (exergy analysis), economic (financial and uncertainty analysis) and environmental (CO 2 emissions) evaluations were carried out. Exergy and environmental analysis favour the SNG production while the hydrogen route provides higher profits. The study concludes with multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) where each process is attributed a score based on the investigated criteria. It was concluded that overall the most efficient option was the SNG production.

Modeling Biowaste Biorefineries: A Review

“…Removing lignin from the feedstock prior to its conversion is costly and additionally inherently results in an unwanted loss of carbon (Li et al, 2018). Biorefineries which employ a thermochemical conversion platform decompose the entire biomass feedstock in its basic structural elements or components, which are subsequently converted to the desired products via tubular flow reactors and catalytic synthesis (Baliban et al, 2013;Michailos et al, 2017). This results in a more efficient usage of the biomass feedstock in comparison to the biochemical conversion platforms.…”

“…Due to the high resemblance of coal and lignocellulosic biomass, early (lignocellulosic) biomass models are unsurprisingly heavily influenced by and based on the already available coal pyrolysis models. For instance, Michailos et al (2017) modeled and compared the fast pyrolysis of bagasse followed by hydroprocessing, and the gasification of bagasse followed by Fischer-Tropsch synthesis. Both processes have already been previously successfully applied for the production of liquid fuels from coal.…”

Design, Sustainability Analysis and Multiobjective Optimisation of Ethanol Production via Syngas Fermentation

“…Bagasse pretreatment was described in details in a previous paper [25] and the same approach was adopted in this study. In short, an Aspen Plus crusher block has been employed to simulate a gyratory crusher which chops bagasse to a final particle size of 2 mm.…”

“…The mathematical formulation of the problem is depicted in Eq. (22)(23)(24)(25)(26). The generated Pareto front for the bioethanol production process is depicted in Figure 8.…”