Process development of oil palm empty fruit bunch gasification by using fluidised bed reactor for hydrogen gas production

Abstract

Hydrogen can store and deliver usable energy, but it does not typically exist by itself in nature and must be produced from compounds that contain it such as biomass. Hydrogen can be used as fuel which produce from gasification process that used renewable sources as feedstock. Large amount of empty fruit bunch (EFB) has been produced in Malaysia and yet has no specific used in large quantity and it is being incinerated or used as landfill material dumped in the plantation. These situations have led to increased CO2 and other greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the atmosphere. During preliminary study, it shows that there are very limited studies being done in the process design development of the hydrogen production by using EFB from oil palm. Despite of tremendous experimental studies done on the effectiveness of using EFB for production of hydrogen, the process implementation in industry is still discouraging. This is due to lack of proven technology and high capital cost of investment. In this study, the drying, gasification and purification unit operations were modelled in Aspen Plus simulator for production of pure hydrogen gas and char was removed significantly after several gas cleaning processes. The final product for purified hydrogen gas is 12.3 t/h which is 16.3 % of hydrogen gas produced from the total EFB feedstock. Based on the result, the optimum temperature and pressure for gasification process is 850 °C and 1 atm respectively. Since, there is not much research have been carried out on process design of hydrogen production process by using EFB as feedstock, the understanding towards this topic can be prolonged.