Sustainable and Efficient Production of Biohydrogen via Gasification of Dried Empty Fruit Bunch

Hydrogen is an important alternative energy in the future. Hydrogen can be produced from a wide variety of primary energy sources using different production technologies. One of the technologies is by using gasification of biomass. Biomass is a feasible resource in Malaysia as palm oil producer in the world. Currently, much research has been focused on sustainable and environmental friendly energy from biomass to replace conventional fossil fuels. Biomass can be considered as the best option and has the largest potential, which meets energy requirements and could ensure fuel supply in the future. Biomass gasification offers the most economical route for the production of renewable hydrogen but it is highly energy intensive. Drying is one of the pretreatment processes to increase heating value of biomass and to reduce the moisture content of Empty Fruit Bunch (EFB). Hence this work proposes to develop a feasible energy-efficient flowsheet design of biohydrogen production from dried EFB. This is done by developing a model for the production using ASPEN HYSIS software. The method involves steam gasification of EFB to produce the main product which is hydrogen as a clean and environment friendly energy fuel. The process of flowsheet development involves of feed treatment, steam generation, gasification and gas cleaning. Pretreatment of EFB for gasifier is done by drying process. Steam temperature was set in the range of 122°C to 152°C and at atmospheric pressure. Usually drying removes the moisture contents from 10-15% in the biomass. In this study, the effect of the operation condition for the drying of hydrogen production efficiency and product quality investigated.