Supercritical Water Gasification of Biomass

It is becoming clearer that alternative forms of energy should be investigated in order to face the increasing world energy consumption. Additionally, process integration of different technologies represents an important step for energy savings. Supercritical water gasification (SCWG), of biomass and organic by-products and waste from the process industry, represents one of the possible future options for syngas production. The technology has the potential to be integrated in industrial processes, for instance existing pulp mills. Through this manuscript, authors aimed at giving a comprehensive overview of the SCWG technology together with the most common methods utilized to investigate the process parameters and the mathematical methods utilized to investigate the rates and yields of the reactions involved. Biomass gasification is not widely employed because there is still the need for improvement of the gasification efficiency (GE) together with the minimization of tar and char formation. However, there are parameters that could lead to minimization of organic deposits and improvement of the GE. Experimental results together with suggestions on further research are given through the text. Although this technology also presents some drawbacks, further investigation and setup developments will give this technology the required degree of maturity for industrial scopes.