The Ni–YSZ cermet anode of the solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) has excellent electrochemical performance in a clean blended synthetic coal syngas mixture. However, chloride, one of the major contaminants existing in coal-derived syngas, may poison the Ni–YSZ cermet and cause degradation in cell performance. Both hydrogen chloride (HCl) and chlorine (Cl 2 ) have been reported to attack the Ni in the anode when using electrolyte-supported SOFCs. In this paper, a commercial anode-supported SOFC was exposed to syngas with a concentration of 100ppm HCl under a constant current load at 800°C for 300h and 850°C for 100h. The cell performance was evaluated periodically using electrochemical methods. A unique feature of this experiment is that the active central part of the anode was exposed directly to the fuel without an intervening current collector. Post-mortem analyses of the SOFC anode were performed using X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). The results show that the 100ppm concentration of HCl causes about 3% loss of performance for the Ni–YSZ anode-supported cell during the 400h test. Permanent changes were noted in the surface microstructure of the nickel particles in the cell anode.