Tar removal from fuel gas obtained from biomass gasification offers a significant challenge in its deployment for power generation as well as for other applications such as production of chemicals by processes such as Fischer-Tropsch. The present investigation focuses on pulsed corona discharges for the mentioned objective. The paper is meant to give an overview of our developments in the area of pulsed power development for large-scale plasma processing. In addition, lab-scale results as well as pilot-scale results for tar removal on an actual gasifier are presented. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.