Biomass Pretreatments for Biorefinery Applications: Gasification

Biorefinery is the object of significant research and development efforts due to the scarcity of economically viable crude oil, renewable energy source, and its environmental benefits. This has prompted chemical corporations to look for alternative sources of carbon and hydrogen to produce chemicals, biologics, and other products such as biomass and waste matter. Two main reaction pathways are currently explored for biorefinery: thermochemical and biochemical. The thermochemical pathway proposes significantly higher reaction rates compared to current biological processes that use non-genetically modified organisms. One of the thermochemical pathways for biomass conversion is gasification which is a decomposition of solid fuels at high temperatures and oxygen-lean atmosphere. The successful development of biomass gasification processes requires addressing several critical technical difficulties including biomass diversity, feedstock treatment, gasification mechanism and reactions, gasifier types, and their performances. This chapter reviews key features of biomass gasification as a pretreatment for biorefining which can be used as a practical guide for gasification process. This chapter consists of six sections that include types of biomass for gasification, their properties, and pretreatment steps; gasification mechanism and reactions; syngas cleaning and conditioning; different gasifier, their characteristics, and modeling. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.