Kinetic study and syngas production from pyrolysis of forestry waste (pine sawdust (PS)) were investigated using a thermogravimetric analyzer (TGA) and a fixed-bed reactor, respectively. In TGA, it was found that the pyrolysis of PS could be divided into three stages and stage II was the major mass reduction stage with mass loss of 7374%. The discrete distributed activation energy model (DAEM) with discrete 200 first-order reactions was introduced to study the pyrolysis kinetic. The results indicated that the DAEM with 200 first-order reactions could approximate the pyrolysis process with an excellent fit between experimental and calculated data. The apparent activation energies of PS ranged from 147.86 kJ.mol(-1) to 395.76 kJ.mol(-1), with corresponding pre-exponential factors of 8.30 x 10(13) s(-1) to 3.11 x 10(25) s(-1). In the fixed-bed reactor, char supported iron catalyst was prepared for tar cracking. Compared with no catalyst which the gas yield and tar yield were 0.58 N m(3)/kg biomass and 201.23 g/kg biomass, the gas yield was markedly increased to 1.02 N m(3)/kg biomass and the tar yield was decreased to only 26.37 g/kg biomass in the presence of char supported iron catalyst. These results indicated that char supported iron catalyst could potentially be used to catalytically decompose tar molecules in syngas generated via biomass pyrolysis. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.