(515h) Design Development of an Integrated Reforming and Gasification Technology for Syngas Production

The
production of syngas is one of the important process in the petrochemical
industries from which many downstream products like ammonia, methanol and
fertilizers are produced. In order to have a
sustainable hydrocarbon fuel usage, the amount of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere must be reduced. Syngas
production technologies can play a role in bridging the gap for the use of
fossil fuels while keeping the emissions within the limits. Syngas can be
produced using gaseous fuels, liquid hydrocarbons and solid feedstocks. The
gaseous and liquid feedstocks utilize technologies such as steam reforming,
partial oxidation, dry reforming, and auto-thermal reforming. With solid
feedstocks such as coal and biomass, gasification is the main technology
available for the syngas production. Recently, dry methane reforming is gaining
a lot of attention as an environmentally friendly process for syngas production
because it consumes two major GHGs, carbon dioxide and methane. It requires
363.6 kg of methane to consume 1 ton of CO₂for
the production of 90.9 kg of H₂ and 1.27 tons of CO. 

This
study is focused on the production of syngas using gasification and dry methane
reforming (DMR) technologies. The two processes are compared as a standalone
design for a syngas production capacity of 10,000 kmol/h
with H₂ to CO ratio of 0.88. The two processes are then integrated
to develop a novel design that can reduce the CO₂ emissions to a
near-zero level with reasonable amount of energy requirement. In this study,
Aspen Plus® has been employed as a process simulation tool.

The results reveal that the standalone
DMR process consumes 5.4 times more energy compared to a gasification plant of
same capacity. This means that due to the high energy demand in the DMR
technology, it will be uneconomical to produce syngas while mitigating CO₂
emissions. Therefore, the integration of gasification and DMR design off-sets
the negative aspects of gasification technology enabling it to utilize
conventional solid fossil fuel with low emission levels. The proposed
integrated design in this study requires 80.5 MW energy compared to the 265 MW
energy required in the DMR design. The study performed a detailed techno-economic
and CO₂ emissions analysis in order to
evaluate the feasibility of the proposed design.

Figure 1: Integrated
gasification and dry reforming design for syngas production