Hydrogen production from ethanol reforming: Catalysts and reaction mechanism

Hydrogen production from ethanol is regarded as a promising way for energy sustainable development, which is undergoing an explosive growth over the last decade. Besides operating conditions, hydrogen yield greatly dependent on the nature of metal and the support selected. To date, Rh based catalysts proved to be the most active systems due to the fact that Rh possessed the greatest capacity toward C–C bond cleavage. Support also played a critical role in terms of hydrogen selectivity and stability. MgO, CeO2 and La2O3 etc were evidenced as suitable supports because of their basic characteristic and/or redox capacity. A detailed analysis based on the spectroscopic technique revealed that reaction pathways proceeded along a mono-functional or bi-functional mechanism according to the types of active metal and support. Ethanol dehydrogenation and/or dehydration reaction mainly occurred on the support, and the diffusion/transformation of the intermediates took place at the metal–support interface. Meanwhile, active metal accelerated the decomposition reaction. The observed catalyst deactivation was normally assigned to the coke formation, active metal sintering and/or oxidation as well as the impurity in crude bio-ethanol. Hence, the scope of this review is to address the present progress in ethanol reforming for hydrogen production including catalyst development and the analysis of the reaction mechanism and kinetics in order to shed light on the design of high efficient catalyst systems and the fundamental understanding of ethanol conversion at the molecular level.