Leire, a PhD student from UPV/EHU visited Professor Bi’s group at UBC from July 2022. She has done the preparation of the biomass samples to be fed into the gasifier, runs and analysis of the results. The gasification plant consisted of three stages: biomass gasification, syngas treatment and methanation. As mentioned above, a double bed unit was used for the gasification stage, since this configuration promotes heat and mass transfer. In these units, steam reacts with the biomass (in this case sawdust) in the gasification reactor, producing syngas and char. The char and the circulating bed material (in this case sand) pass into the char combustion chamber, where the temperature rises due to the exothermicity of the process. The hot solids leaving the combustion chamber return to the gasifier to provide heat to the gasification process. In this way, high carbon conversion and high syngas quality are obtained. The syngas from the gasification reactor and the flue gas from the combustion chamber are treated in separate gas cleaning trains. The operational complexity of large plants is well known. Accordingly, natural gas is first used to reach the reaction temperature and then air and biomass are introduced to reach the final reaction temperature by combustion. In the syngas cleaning stage, contaminants such as HCl, H₂S, tar, particulates, etc., are removed. The methanation stage consists of one reactor for the WGS (Water Gas Shift) reaction and two reactors for the methanation reaction.

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