Hydrogen production form glycerol steam reforming in supercritical water with CO2 absorption unit

Abstract

Glycerol is expected to be an adequate renewable resource for hydrogen production in the future because it is the by-product of biodiesel production. In this work, crude glycerol containing 80 wt% of glycerol and 20 wt% of methanol is used to perform the thermodynamic analysis of hydrogen production via the glycerol supercritical steam reforming process using the Gibbs free energy minimization method in AspenPlusTM. The effects of operating conditions i.e., temperature, pressure and the ratio of supercritical water to crude glycerol (S/G ratio), in the reformer were analyzed. The simulation results show that the suitable operating conditions for the reformer giving 65 mol% H2 in the gaseous product are at temperature, pressure and S/G ratio of 800 C, 240 atm and 90. However, the purity of hydrogen is still not suitable for industrial application. Therefore, the hydrogen purification processes including the gas-liquid separation unit and CO2 absorption process using monoethanolamine (MEA) as an absorption media were also investigated. The results show that the final product of the absorption process using 5-stage absorber can produce approximately up to 99 mol% H2.. Copyright © 2014, AIDIC Servizi S.r.l.