Oxygen removal from syngas by catalytic oxidation of copper catalyst

The syngas from biomass gasification may contain trace oxygen besides of gaseous hydrocarbons, which will result in the temporarily or even permanently deactivation of Fischer–Tropsch (F–T) catalysts. In this paper, CuO–CeO2/Al2O3 catalyst was developed to efficiently remove the trace oxygen from biomass syngas. The experimental results demonstrated that CuO–CeO2/Al2O3 catalyst was considerably effective in removing oxygen to the level of below 1 ppm, its lifetime and deoxygenation capacity were 160 h and 3000 ml/g, respectively. Moreover, the optimum conditions of CuO–CeO2/Al2O3 catalyst were 200 °C, 3.45 × 105 Pa, and 3000 h−1 gas hourly space velocity.