Potentiality of a biogas membrane reformer for decentralized hydrogen production

BIONICO system model is implemented in Aspen Plus and Aspen Custom Modeler to perform respectively the balance of plant with thermal integration and a detailed fluidized bed membrane reactor design. Two permeate side configurations, sweep gas and vacuum pump, were modelled and compared. The adoption of membrane reactor increases the system efficiency by more than 20% points with respect to reference cases. Focusing on the economic results, hydrogen production cost show lower value respect to the reference cases (4 €/kgH2 vs 4.2 €/kgH2) at the same hydrogen delivery pressure of 20 bar. Between the landfill and anaerobic digestion cases, the latter has the lower costs as consequence of the higher methane content.