With clean hydrogen identified as the key to decarbonising a swathe of industries from steel to manufacturing, there has been a great deal of focus on where all the hydrogen is going to come from.
The favoured solution for many is green hydrogen, produced by splitting water into its constituent parts with electrolysers powered by renewable energy. It’s a great solution that will likely provide the world with the majority of the zero-carbon fuel in the coming decades.
There are, however, other emerging technologies for producing clean hydrogen, many of which rely on different materials to electrolysers, providing the kind of diversity that is healthy for any ecosystem.
Just this week, Edinburgh’s Heriot-Watt University and Malaysia’s Petronas announced a £1 million research project to explore technologies that use thermochemical reactions to produce hydrogen from biomass and other waste materials.
The initial target for the project will be the approximately 4million tonnes of waste and by-products created by the UK’s distilleries, and the 127 million tonnes of agriculture waste produced annually in Malaysia.
Waste is also being used as a feedstock by UK company Powerhouse Energy, which has developed a technology called Distributed Modular Generation that turns plastic, end-of-life tyres and other usually unrecyclable waste into syngas, which can be used to make hydrogen, electricity, and chemical inputs.
Edinburgh’s Heriot-Watt University and Malaysia’s Petronas announced a £1 million research project to explore technologies that use thermochemical reactions to produce hydrogen from biomass and other waste materials.
Among its UK customers is Peel Environmental, which is seeking to build waste-to-hydrogen facilities at Protos Energy Park in Cheshire, and Rothesay Dock on the north bank of the River Clyde in Scotland.
Luxembourg-based Boson Energy has developed a plasma-assisted gasification process that breaks down waste into hydrogen, carbon dioxide and a molten slurry that solidifies into a blue-grey glassy rock.
Boson believes it can cover the cost of hydrogen production by selling the CO2 to industrial customers, the rock to construction companies as aggregate, and charging a fee to local authorities for treating their waste.
It claims to be able to produce 100 kg of carbon-negative hydrogen for every tonne of waste and requires 6 times less renewable electricity than electrolysing water.
There are also other methods of electrolysis being developed, including plasma-driven solution electrolysis, which has a number of advantages over more conventional methods, such as alkaline electrolysis, solid oxide electrolysis, and polymer electrolyte membrane hydrolysis. As well as producing anenergy yield 3.9 times higher than alternatives, there is no need for the precious metal catalysts that drive today’s electrolysers.
There are also some disadvantages of the method, such as the need for gas separation methods to provide high-efficiency removal of hydrogen from gas mixtures, but it could yet develop into a mainstream commercial technology.
Other technologies being explored include a technique being developed by Nanomox Ltd. that produces hydrogen while treating waste from the steel industry.
HiiROC and Jaguar Land Rover were recently awarded £281,000 by the UK government to research the feasibility of thermal plasma electrolysis to produce hydrogen and mitigate the emissions created from industrial paint shop processes.
As part of the same round of awards, ASH Waste Services, Compact Syngas Solutions, and Pure Energy Centre were granted £176,000 to develop a system for turning solid recoverable fuel (SRF) waste into hydrogen.
As is always the case with early stage technologies, not all will make it to commercialisation, but the pipeline of potential technologies feeding into the hydrogen ecosystem is healthy and should ensure there are a range of ways to produce clean hydrogen and decarbonise the economy in the process.
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SOURCE: HYCAP
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