Enhanced investigation of nickel and precious metal based catalysts for reforming of biomass gasification tars

Allothermal steam gasification with its favorable gas composition is considered as a promosing alternative for supplying carbon based energy carriers on a renewable basis. Despite of numerous research efforts in the past years in the field of catalytic tar removal, catalyst deactivation due to sulfur poisoning, and the lack of applicable knowledge due to a lack of tests in a large scale applications, still remain as main challenges for the application of catalytic tar reformers in combination with this method of gasification In this study a large variety of different state of the art and newly developed catalysts are tested in a laboratory test system. The goal of this work is to assess the feasibility of the combination of modern catalytic reforming catalysts with allothermal steam gasification with regards to tar removal performance and structure-activity relationships.