Final report on the pilot plant operation for supercritical water gasification of wet biomass

Supercritical water gasification has been developed as gasification technology for wet biomass. This is because the reaction takes place in water, and drying pretreatment is not needed. So far, production of gas and utilization of this producer gas has been discussed. However, devices to use gas such as gas engine or fuel cell are expensive. One possibility is to use heat as final product. To examine the possibility to use heat from supercritical water gasification, the pilot scale plant located in Chugoku Electric Power Co., Inc. was modified, and heat recovery experiment was conducted. To avoid the char production, addition of radical scavenger was also tried. Heat recovery with the efficiency of 24.7 % was achieved and DSS operation for 147 h 30 min in total was successful.