Critical assessment of plasma tar reforming during biomass gasification: A review on advancement in plasma technology

Abstract

The contamination of producer gas with tar due to inefficient removal methods remains a major challenge in the bioenergy industry and a critical barrier, hindering commercial applications of biomass gasification technology. Single syngas treatment through primary and secondary tar removal method is insufficient to produce a tar free syngas. Currently widely applied tar removal methods are catalytic reforming and plasma reforming. Though both methods have hindrances of fast catalyst deactivation due to coke deposition and reduced syngas selectivity with large quantities of undesired liquid products from plasma reforming. Our review paper showed that hybrid plasma catalysis could be a breakthrough in tar reforming methods and overcome major drawbacks. Though, very little work on review articles have reported merging non-thermal plasma and heterogeneous catalyst. Plasma catalysis offers an inexpensive viable future technology of tar reforming through biomass gasification. The article assessed in-depth the synergistic effect created during the interaction of energetic plasma species and catalyst radicals in tar reforming. Review results show that merging plasma with catalysts noticeably Nickel, Non-nickel metal catalyst and zeolites gave pleasant results of tar conversion efficiency, improved gas selectivity and improved catalyst stability.