Hydrogen production by the reaction integrated novel gasification (HyPr-RING) method was first proposed in 1999. This method involves the reactions of coal and CaO with H2O, that is, a combination of exothermic and endothermic, gas production and gas separation reactions, in a gasifier to produce H2. The equipment for the HyPr-RING process consists mainly of a gasifier, a sorbent regenerator, and several heat exchangers. In this study, the process components and their mass and energy balances were analyzed by thermodynamic calculations. A fuel gas comprising an equilibrium mixture of 91% H2 and 9% CH4 can be obtained by gasification of coal at 923 K and 3.0 MPa. The amount of fuel gas produced was calculated to be equivalent to 1.4 Nm3/kgcoal, giving a high cold gas efficiency of 0.77. The equilibrium H2 and CH4 compositions are sensitive to the amount of steam contained in the product gas.
The energy contained in the coal is used in the gasifier and the regenerator in a ratio of about 3/2. This gives a good energy balance and a high cold gas efficiency for the process.