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Conventional district heating and cooling (DHC) systems are compelled to reduce their fossil fuel dependency while ensuring profitability as cooling and heating demands decline. One solution is to retrofit the system with a gasifier and product gas upgrading equipment so that the system will be able to diversify its fuel input, including biomass and waste resources, while simultaneously producing synthetic natural gas (SNG), synthetic gas (syngas) and char complementarily to heat, cold and electricity. The main objective of this study is to assess energetically and economically a polygeneration DHC system based on gasification of refuse derived fuels considering the following sub-product scenarios: char; char and syngas; char and SNG; and char, syngas and SNG. The results show that when char is the only sub-product of the modified DHC system, the investment payback is 3 years, the discounted net cash flow (DNCF) is 142 mln USD, and the system trigeneration efficiency is 83.6%. When other sub-products are supplied by the system, its performance reduces but the system DNCF increases, while the investment payback remains constant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pretreatment of biomass becomes more and more important due to the large scale application of biomass having low energy density. In this paper, steam exploded biomass pellets (Black pellets) and unpretreated biomass pellets (Gray pellets) were gasified with air and steam at an updraft HTAG (High Temperature Agent Gasification) unit. Decomposition characteristics of pellets were first analyzed with TGA (thermo gravimetric analysis). Early decomposition of hemicellulose and cellulose were seen with Black pellets around 241 °C and 367 °C respectively. Introducing CO2 led comparatively high mass loss rate with Black pellets. Gasification of Black pellets resulted in syngas with high CO and hydrocarbon contents while Gasification of Gray pellets resulted in high H2 content of syngas. LHV (lower heating value) of syngas was high around 7.3 MJ/Nm3 and 10.6 MJ/Nm3 with air gasification and steam gasification respectively. Even with significantly low syngas temperature with gasification of Black pellets, only slightly high total tar content was seen compared to that of Gray pellets gasification. Phenolic compounds dominated the tar composition. In general, steam gasification of Black pellets seems to be more feasible if syngas with high energy value is desired. If higher H2 yield is preferred, gasification of unpretreated pellets likely to be more attractive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]