A review of recent developments and future prospects in gasification systems and their modeling

Abstract

Gasification is receiving a renaissance in response to global warming mitigation. Total gasification installation, construction and planning energy capacity has increased from 42 GWth to 400 GWth between 1999 and 2020. One of the drivers of gasification technologies that has influenced their increase is their capability to accommodate low-value feedstock and organic wastes. Another driving factor is the technology prospect for enhanced power efficiency and environmental performance when used in Integration Combined Cycle (IGCC) with carbon capture. Although gasification has been at the forefront of many studies, it is missing comprehensiveness and organization of the vast information in the literature. There are more than 600,000 studies that focus on gasification and they are mostly very chaotic for their usage for further research development and policy decision making. For instance, the field of modeling and simulation of reactive flow has expanded and high fidelity analyses have been utilized in addressing gasification challenges significantly. Moreover, there had been new developments in areas such as plasma gasification, supercritical water gasification, small scale gasification systems developments, co-gasification and coupling of gasification with other technologies such as anaerobic digestion. Hence, in this work we present a systematic organization of the reported findings, recent developments and future prospects. Recent developments on feed material characteristics of different fuels utilized for gasification in order to evaluate their potential is reported herein. In addition, literature survey of gasification processes, classifications of gasification and influence of process parameters and technologies were also reported. The effect of different parameters like pressure, catalyst, and temperature on the gasification efficiency and gas composition were extracted and presented. At the end, some areas that have witnessed recent progress were highlighted and future prospects in this continually growing thermochemical conversion field was presented.