Industrial scale steam reforming of bioethanol: A conceptual study

This study investigates the technical feasibility of using existing steam reforming and hydrogen separation technologies to produce hydrogen from bioethanol on an industrial scale (100,000 Nm3/h of hydrogen). Two separate reaction schemes for producing hydrogen from bioethanol are compared. One scheme utilises both a prereformer and steam reformer, and the other requires a steam reformer only.Using data from PRO/II simulations, the findings for the processes developed around the two reaction schemes are compared, based on a range of quantitative and qualitative measures. Full heat integration is conducted for both schemes, with two different cases developed for the prereformer scheme.Ethanol-to-hydrogen processes based on catalytic reactions can only be brought into production when suitable reaction catalysts have been developed and proved. This is the major technical challenge which must be overcome to enable the processes investigated in this study to be implemented.