Determination of the Effect of Coal/Biomass-Derived Syngas Contaminants on the Performance of Fischer-Tropsch and Water-Gas-Shift Catalysts

Abstract

Today, nearly all liquid fuels and commodity chemicals are produced from non-renewable resources such as crude oil and natural gas. Because of increasing scrutiny of carbon dioxide (CO{sub 2}) emissions produced using traditional fossil-fuel resources, the utilization of alternative feedstocks for the production of power, hydrogen, value-added chemicals, and high-quality hydrocarbon fuels such as diesel and substitute natural gas (SNG) is critical to meeting the rapidly growing energy needs of modern society. Coal and biomass are particularly attractive as alternative feedstocks because of the abundant reserves of these resources worldwide. The strategy of co-gasification of coal/biomass (CB) mixtures to produce syngas for synthesis of Fischer-Tropsch (FT) fuels offers distinct advantages over gasification of either coal or biomass alone. Co-feeding coal with biomass offers the opportunity to exploit economies of scale that are difficult to achieve in biomass gasification, while the addition of biomass to the coal gasifier feed leverages proven coal gasification technology and allows CO{sub 2} credit benefits. Syngas generated from CB mixtures will have a unique contaminant composition because coal and biomass possess different concentrations and types of contaminants, and the final syngas composition is also strongly influenced by the gasification technology used. Syngas cleanup for gasification of CB mixtures will need to address this unique contaminant composition to support downstream processing and equipment. To investigate the impact of CB gasification on the production of transportation fuels by FT synthesis, RTI International conducted thermodynamic studies to identify trace contaminants that will react with water-gas-shift and FT catalysts and built several automated microreactor systems to investigate the effect of single components and the synergistic effects of multiple contaminants on water-gas-shift and FT catalyst performance. The contaminants investigated were sodium chloride (NaCl), potassium chloride (KCl), hydrogen sulfide (H{sub 2}S), carbonyl sulfide (COS), ammonia (NH{sub 3}), and combinations thereof. This report details the thermodynamic studies and the individual and multi-contaminant results from this testing program.