Oxidative steam reforming of glycerol. A review

This review article presents the state-of-the-art on the catalytic oxidative steam reforming (OSR) of glycerol to produce syngas. Concerning the different technologies proposed for the catalytic OSR of glycerol, the following key points can be highlighted: (1) the robustness is much higher than other reforming technologies, (2) several catalysts can work with low deactivation, some of which can recover almost full activity by suitable regeneration, (3) syngas production by catalytic OSR of glycerin is higher than with concurrent technologies, (4) their scaling-up remains an unrealized task, (5) the thermodynamics of the process has been sufficiently covered in the literature, (6) there is a significant lack of kinetic and mechanistic studies that could help gaining deeper insight on the process, (7) novel concepts and reactor designs must be proposed for their development at larger scales, (8) new catalyst formulations must be developed for attaining higher resistance against oxidation and (9) process intensification could help developing them at larger scales.