A novel pyrolysis followed by in-line cascaded catalytic reforming process without additional steam was developed to produce high-purity syngas from woody biomass. The key to the proposed process is the construction of a cascaded biochar + NiAl2O4 catalytic reforming process in which biochar acts as a pre-reforming catalyst, and NiAl2O4 acts as a primary reforming catalyst. The large oxygenates in the pyro-vapors are deeply cracked in the biochar layer due to the increased residence time in the hot-biochar bed. The remaining small molecules are then reformed with the autogenerated steam from pyrolysis catalyzed by the reduced Ni0 species in the NiAl2O4 catalyst (NiAlO). The results showed that the yield of syngas for the optimized process was 71.28 wt% (including 44.44 mg-H2/g-biomass and 536.48 mg-CO/g-biomass), and the CO2 yield of the process was only 3 kg-CO2/kg-hydrogen. High-purity syngas with 89.47 vol% of (H2 + CO) was obtained, and the gas energy conversion efficiency (GECE) of the process reached 75.65%. The study shows that in the cascaded catalytic reforming process, cracking of the large oxygenates and reforming of the small molecules are promoted sequentially in separated biochar + NiAlO catalyst layers, which maximizes the syngas production and improves the activity and stability of the Ni-based catalyst. © 2022 The Author(s)