HIGH EFFICIENCY SYNGAS GENERATION
This project investigated an efficient and low cost method of auto-thermally reforming natural gas to hydrogen and carbon monoxide. Reforming is the highest cost step in producing products such as methanol and Fisher Tropsch liquids (i.e., gas to liquids); and reducing the cost of reforming is the key to reducing the cost of these products. Steam reforming is expensive because of the high cost of the high nickel alloy reforming tubes (i.e., indirectly fired reforming tubes). Conventional auto-thermal or Partial Oxidation (POX) reforming minimizes the size and cost of the reformers and provides a near optimum mixture of CO and hydrogen. However POX requires pure oxygen, which consumes power and significantly increases the cost to reforming. Our high efficiency process extracts oxygen from low-pressure air with novel oxygen sorbent and transfers the oxygen to a nickel-catalyzed reformer. The syngas is generated at process pressure (typically 20 to 40 bar) without nitrogen dilution and has a 1CO to 2H{sub 2} ratio that is near optimum for the subsequent production of Fisher-Tropsch liquid to liquids and other chemicals (i.e., Gas to Liquids, GTL). Our high process efficiency comes from the way we transfer the oxygen into the reformer. All of the components of the process, except for the oxygen sorbent, are commonly used in commercial practice. A process based on a longlived, regenerable, oxygen transfer sorbent could substantially reduce the cost of natural gas reforming to syngas. Lower cost syngas (CO + 2H{sub 2}) that is the feedstock for GTL would reduce the cost of GTL and for other commercial applications (e.g., methanol, other organic chemicals). The vast gas resources of Alaska's North Slope (ANS) offer more than 22 Tcf of gas and GTL production in this application alone, and could account for as much as 300,000 to 700,000 bpd for 20 to 30+ years. We developed a new sorbent, which is an essential part of the High Efficiency Oxygen Process (HOP). We tested the sorbent and observed that it has both a good oxygen capacity and operates as a highly effective reforming catalyst. We conducted a long duration tests of the sorbent (1,500 hours of continuous operation in the HOP cycle). Although the sorbent lost some oxygen capacity with cycling, the sorbent oxygen capacity stabilized after 1,000 hours and remained constant to the end of the test, 1,500 hour. The activity of the catalyst to reform methane to a hydrogen and carbon monoxide mixture was unchanged through the oxidation/reduction cycling. Our cost and performance analyses indicated a significant reduction in the cost of GTL production when using the HOP process integrated into a GTL plant.
- Research Organization:
- TDA Research, Inc. (US)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- (US)
- DOE Contract Number:
- FC26-01NT41226
- OSTI ID:
- 840258
- Resource Relation:
- Other Information: PBD: 1 Feb 2005
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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