Hydrogen production from sludge in supercritical water and its energy evaluation

Gasification of high moisture content biomass in supercritical water has been identified as a promising alternative system for producing renewable hydrogen. Supercritical water partial oxidation is the process by which an oxidant appears during the reaction. The key advantage of this process is the rapid heating of the gasification medium, resulting in less char formation and improved hydrogen yield. Many researchers have studied the supercritical water gasification of model compounds. However, real biomass which is of importance for large production of hydrogen has yet to be thoroughly examined. In this paper, gasification of high moisture content municipal sludge was studied in a continuous reactor employing hydrogen peroxide as an oxygen source. The reaction was tested across temperatures and pressures in the range of 673 to 873 K and 24 to 30 MPa, and across various residence times ranging from 3 to 15 minutes. We found that sludge at low concentrations can be completely gasified with no observable char or tar formation. The improvement of gasification efficiency by partial oxidation was accompanied with a high yield of hydrogen and carbon monoxide. Through this, we evaluated the energy efficiency of sludge gasification. Our thermodynamic calculations show that the energy efficiency reaches 50% when considering hydrogen, carbon monoxide, and methane as the valuable gases in the ideal case. Taking into account the energy recovery from the hot water at 30 MPa and 873 K and assuming the ideal scenario of no external heat loss, the overall energy yield potentially reaches 85%. Our results show that the key mechanism of the gasification process is energy recovery, as the chemical reaction is endothermic and requires high temperatures.