Advanced Gas Cleaning using Chemical-Looping Reforming (CLR)

Paper in proceeding, 2014

When using a fluidized bed gasification technology to gasify biomass for the downstream synthesis to biofuels or chemicals, the biggest challenge is associated with the reforming of hydrocarbons into desirable gas components. These unwanted hydrocarbons are formed during the primary conversion step of the biomass. They range from ethylene to larger aromatic components or even methane if it is not the desired product, and introduce numerous problems to the operation, but also require additional process steps that significantly influence the competitiveness of the overall process. An efficient way to tackle this problem is to provide catalytic surfaces for hydrocarbon reforming directly inside the gasifier by using a catalytic bed material and/or in one or several secondary reactors. In this work, a concept based on this principle and named Chemical-Looping Reforming (CLR) is presented and it is discussed how this concept has the potential to be implemented for both primary and secondary reforming of hydrocarbons.