Shale Gas & Biomass Co-Gasification for Syngas Production

According to the U.S Energy Information Administration, the production of Appalachian shale gas grew manifold from 7.8 Bcf/d in 2012 to 23.8 Bcf/d in 2017. Thus Appalachian shale gas which is abundant in West Virginia has been the key component of U.S’s ever increasing natural gas production. With the cost of U.S natural gas hovering just over $2.5/MMBtu, utility of natural gas as a primary feedstock for fuels and value added chemicals has tremendous potential. At the same time lingo-cellulosic biomass generated from the agriculture, dairy, poultry, and related activities has potential to transform the transportation, energy, and value-added chemicals industry in a major way. The complexity and variation in biomass feedstock and its lower heating value compared to coal and natural gas limits extensive use of biomass as a sustainable feedstock. Ligno-cellulosic biomass being a complex array of aromatic rings and unsaturated carbons, it needs upgradation before it can be used as fuel or feedstock for chemical synthesis.

Thus biomass gasification is a commercially viable and economic pathway to produce syngas from biomass which can be used as feedstock for Fischer-Tropsch or related processes for chemical synthesis. However, high oxygen content and aromatic nature of ligno-cellulosic biomass yields low quality syngas with H₂:CO ratio of about 1.2 to 1.4.

Thus we propose co-gasification of shale gas or essentially methane – biomass without pyrolysis or partial-gasification of methane to CO, CO₂ but via activation of the methane species and dissociation of the C-H bond. This study aims to perform an extensive reaction kinetics and mechanistic study of a possible hydrogen transfer between methane hydrogen and biomass unsaturated carbon. The co-gasification of biomass and methane will be performed at different reaction conditions of temperature, equivalence ratio, heating rate etc. Methane – biomass co-gasification will be studied under catalytic and non-catalytic environment to observe the effect of metal-doped zeolite ZSM-5 like catalyst on activation of methane and co-gasification of methane-biomass.

We have developed two reactor setups to test the gasification reaction kinetics. A fixed bed reactor setup and a bench scale bubbling fluidized bed reactor. Initially Thermo-gravimetric Analyzer (TGA) – Mass Spectrometry setup will be used for parametric reaction kinetics study of biomass-methane co-gasification and the optimized reaction conditions will be tested on the two gasifier reactor setups mentioned above. Hardwood pellet biomass will be used in this study and methane will be used initially for mechanistic studies which will be later replaced by commercial natural gas.