Report on optimal plants for production of low-carbon H2 with state-of-the-art technologies

One of the greatest challenges to society is to reduce and avoid greenhouse gas emissions to mitigate climate change. Nevertheless, there are sectors like mobility and residential heating which may be difficult to decarbonize because of distributed CO2 emissions. In these cases, lowcarbon hydrogen might help to decrease their carbon footprint. Currently, around 90% of the feedstock used in the production of hydrogen are from fossil resources, e.g. natural gas. During the conversion process from fossil fuel to hydrogen, a significant amount of carbon dioxide is produced and if not captured, emitted to the atmosphere. Steam methane reforming (SMR) is the leading technology for H2 production from natural gas and light hydrocarbons. A valuable option to produce low-carbon hydrogen – or blue hydrogen - is to combine the SMR process with CCS (carbon capture and storage). To further decrease the hydrogen’s carbon footprint, natural gas can be substituted with biogas or biomass, where biogenic CO2 will be emitted instead. The aim of this deliverable is to present the state-of-the-art technology for blue hydrogen production from natural gas with carbon capture. Additionally, alternative production processes are analysed that use biogas or biomass as a feedstock. Besides informing on the current state-of-the-art technologies, the goal of this work is also to define methods for comparison of the SotA with novel H2/CO2 purification processes developed in the frame of ELEGANCY. One of these includes vacuum pressure swing adsorption (VPSA), currently under development at ETH Zürich. In deliverable D1.1.1 a detailed technical description and some preliminary results of the VPSA process performance are presented. In this deliverable we present different options for CO2 capture from an SMR process including a performance comparison in terms of capture rate, efficiency, and cost. We also present preliminary results on the optimisation of the MDEA flowsheet and operating variables and show that SMR is thermodynamically capable of converting biogas into hydrogen. Last, we describe a pilot-scale biomass gasification plant in Sweden, to exemplify how such a process could also be used for hydrogen production.