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Palm oil industry in Malaysia generates huge quantity of solid biomass every year including trunks, fronds, empty fruit bunches (EFB), shells and fibers as wastes from palm oil fruit harvest and oil extraction processing. These large volumes of wastes represent a big environmental threat for Malaysia. The great potential of oil palm biomass has motivated an increasing interest in the utilization of these wastes (i.e.EFB) as a source of clean energy. Fuel and chemical characteristics of the EFB undertaken in this study confirmed that it is a good candidate for gasification process as it is comparable to other lignocellulosic biomass. As a thermal process, gasification has been used to treat oil palm wastes due to its high conversion efficiency. This study evaluated the possibility to treat EFB via gasification process for hydrogen-rich gas production. In this study, the EFB obtained from a local palm oil mill was gasified in an atmospheric bench-scale fluidized-bed gasifier (FBG) using air as gasifying agent. The operating parameters,such as effects of gasifier temperature (700–1000 °C), equivalence ratio (0.15-0.35),feedstock particle size (<0.3, 0.3–0.5, 0.5–1.0 mm), and addition of catalysts (as a primary and secondary) were studied to evaluate the gasification yields and performance so as to reach maximum tar-free hydrogen-rich gas production. The main gas species generated, as identified by a gas chromatography (GC), were H2, CO, CO2 and CH4. With gasification temperature increases the total gas yield was enhanced greatly and reached the maximum value at 1000 °C with a large fraction of H2 (38.02 vol.%) and CO (36.36 vol.%). Equivalence ratio (ER) showed a significant influence on the upgrading of hydrogen production and product distribution. The optimum ER value of 0.25 was found to attain a higher H2 yield. Feedstock particle size showed an influence on the improvement of the gas yield. Smaller EFB particles size produced more H2, CO, CH4 and less CO2. Tar for