{"id":260390,"date":"2021-05-27T16:17:06","date_gmt":"2021-05-27T13:17:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/on-site-hydrogen-production-technology-accelerates-to-market\/"},"modified":"2021-05-27T16:17:06","modified_gmt":"2021-05-27T13:17:06","slug":"on-site-hydrogen-production-technology-accelerates-to-market","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/on-site-hydrogen-production-technology-accelerates-to-market\/","title":{"rendered":"#On-site hydrogen production technology accelerates to market"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#On-site hydrogen production technology<\/a> accelerates to market<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

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\n A new hydrogen generator design, about 11-inches in diameter, combined with a microchannel heat exchanger,\u00a0enables on-site production of hydrogen at fueling stations. Credit: Scott Butner | Scott Butner Photography, LLC
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A new technology that generates hydrogen from conventional natural gas, or renewable natural gas made from biomass, could be the next big thing to advance California’s Hydrogen Highway, fuel cell vehicles and trucks and to create other valuable products.<\/p>\n

Tiny channels\u2014about the width of a credit card\u2014that transfer heat underpin the technology developed at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. These microchannels are critical to efficiently driving the energy into the chemical reactions that produce hydrogen for transportation, electricity generation and other industrial purposes.<\/p>\n

The PNNL-developed hydrogen generator was licensed to a Richland, Wash. cleantech start-up company, STARS Technology Corporation. The hydrogen generator features two recent innovations that may drive down the cost of hydrogen. The first is a new additive manufacturing process that has been licensed to both STARS TC and SoCalGas\u2014a Los Angeles-based gas distribution utility that serves 22 million people in Central and Southern California. The second is a novel spiral reactor design that distributes heat more precisely and improves the reactor efficiency. This design, exclusively licensed to SoCalGas, minimizes the energy required to produce hydrogen while increasing the reactor’s durability and safety.<\/p>\n

“One near-term use for this microchannel technology would be making hydrogen for fuel cell electric vehicles,” said Yuri Freedman, senior director of research and development at SoCalGas. “Because this technology offers a small footprint and substantially increases the efficiency of the process that reforms natural gas into hydrogen, it makes hydrogen much cleaner and easier to deliver\u2014you could produce hydrogen anywhere there is a natural gas pipeline nearby. For us at SoCalGas, this is an important step toward meeting our goal to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions<\/a> in our operations and delivery of energy by 2045. This technology could drastically change hydrogen production and use in California, advancing SoCalGas’ efforts to meet the climate objectives of California and our customers.”
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Fueling hydrogen infrastructure<\/b><\/p>\n

Because the STARS technology can generate hydrogen anywhere natural gas is available, developers say this technology can greatly reduce the need for hauling hydrogen in special high-pressure tube-trailers. Eliminating on-road transit improves public safety, reduces greenhouse gas emissions and helps make point-of-use hydrogen production cost competitive with conventional fuels.<\/p>\n

“Think of these small, efficient, mass-produced generators as ‘chemical transformers’ similar to electrical transformers on the electric grid,” said Bob Wegeng, president of STARS TC and an inventor of the technology. “They can be placed anywhere along the natural gas distribution system, so it becomes a ‘hydrogen grid’ by providing inexpensive hydrogen for filling stations in quantities that match on-site demand.”<\/p>\n

Producing hydrogen from methane<\/b><\/p>\n

The most abundant element in the universe, hydrogen, is typically part of other compounds like water or methane. Natural gas is comprised mostly of methane, one of nature’s most efficient hydrogen carriers. Conventional hydrogen production processes using natural gas can sometimes emit carbon dioxide and use a lot of energy\u2014much of it generated from carbon emitting sources. But with the new hydrogen generator, a variety of more efficient heating app<\/a>roaches, including concentrated solar thermal and inductive solar-electric heating, can be used to heat natural gas and water to break the chemical bonds, emitting 30 percent less carbon dioxide than other common methane to hydrogen processes.<\/p>\n


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