Economic feasibility study of hydrogen production from biomass gasification for PEM fuel cell applications

There are several thermochemical ways to produce heat and power from carbon-based fuels such as combustion, gasification, and devolatilization. Among them, gasification is a good candidate for clean energy production due to low cost, environmentally friendly products, and numerous industrial applications. In this work, we developed an Aspen Plus model of biomass gasification to evaluate its economic potential for hydrogen production, where the accuracy of the model was proved in our previous work. Results showed that the energy generated for proton-exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cell is lower than that of combined heat and power probably due to the fact that the gasification process produces a clean syngas (H₂, CO, and CH₄) but PEM fuel cell uses the energy of hydrogen gas for power generation.