Energy requirements for vegetable oils to hydrogen process

This study has estimated the process energy requirements for producing H2 from vegetable oils by steam reforming and has identified the most energy intensive step in the process in order to exploit opportunities for reducing energy requirements. A flowsheet was developed in ChemCad 6.4 and comprised three major steps: i) Steam reforming of vegetable oil, ii) Water-gas-shift (WGS) reaction and iii) CO2 removal from the produced H 2. The vegetable oil was modeled by triolein and steam-to-carbon (S/C) ratios of 3, 6 and 9 were considered. The energy required for H2 production was estimated as ca. 111, 112 and 114 MJ/Kg for S/C ratios of 3, 6 and 9 respectively. The CO2 removal process was found to be the most energy intensive accounting for ca. 60% of the process energy requirements. The major contributor to the high energy requirement for this section is CO2 stripping.