Publications

Gas switching reforming (GSR) is a promising technology for natural gas reforming with inherent CO₂ capture. Like conventional steam methane reforming (SMR) GSR can be integrated with CO₂ -gas shift and pressure swing adsorption units for pure hydrogen production. The resulting GSR-H2 process concept was techno-economically assessed in this study. Results showed that GSR-H2 can achieve 96% CO₂ capture at a CO₂ avoidance cost of 15 $/ton (including CO₂ transport and storage). Most components of the GSR-H2 process are proven technologies but long-term oxygen carrier stability presents an important technical uncertainty that can adversely affect competitiveness when the material lifetime drops below one year. Relative to the SMR benchmark GSR-H2 replaces some fuel consumption with electricity consumption making it more suitable to regions with higher natural gas prices and lower electricity prices. Some minor alterations to the process configuration can adjust the balance between fuel and electricity consumption to match local market conditions. The most attractive commercialization pathway for the GSR-H2 technology is initial construction without CO2 capture followed by simple retrofitting for CO₂ capture when CO₂ taxes rise and CO₂ transport and storage infrastructure becomes available. These features make the GSR-H2 technology robust to almost any future energy market scenario.

Efficient energy production and consumption are fundamental points for reducing carbon emissions that influence climate change. Alternative resources such as renewable energy sources (RESs) used in electricity grids could reduce the environmental impact. Since RESs are inherently unreliable during the last decades the scientific community addressed research efforts to their integration with the main grid by means of properly designed energy storage systems (ESSs). In order to highlight the best performance from these hybrid systems proper design and operations are essential. The purpose of this paper is to present a so-called model predictive controller (MPC) for the optimal operations of grid-connected wind farms with hydrogen-based ESSs and local loads. Such MPC has been designed to take into account the operating and economical costs of the ESS the local load demand and the participation to the electricity market and further it enforces the fulfillment of the physical and the system's dynamics constraints. The dynamics of the hydrogen-based ESS have been modeled by means of the mixed-logic dynamic (MLD) framework in order to capture different behaviors according to the possible operating modes. The purpose is to provide a controller able to cope both with all the main physical and operating constraints of a hydrogen-based storage system including the switching among different modes such as ON OFF STAND-BY and at the same time reduce the management costs and increase the equipment lifesaving. The case study for this paper is a plant under development in the north Norway. Numerical analysis on the related plant data shows the effectiveness of the proposed strategy which manages the plant and commits the equipment so as to preserve the given constraints and save them from unnecessary commutation cycles.

As the world’s largest integrated energy and chemicals company Saudi Aramco continues to invest in technologies and innovative business models to enable the sustainable use of hydrocarbon resources across the value chain.  In this podcast David Ledesma discusses with Yasser Mufti Vice President Strategy & Market Analysis Saudi Aramco about Saudi Aramco’s perspectives on hydrogen its opportunities and challenges. This wide-ranging interview discusses Saudi Aramco’s investment in new technologies and the sustainable use of its hydrocarbon resources before addressing the role of hydrogen in achieving a low emissions economy possible business models and the barriers to achieving hydrogen’s growth. The podcast then moves on to discuss ammonia carbon capture utilisation and storage finishing up with a forward-looking perspective on the vision for Saudi Aramco asking how will the company look in 2050 and specifically whether it will still be a hydrocarbon company?

The podcast can be found on their website

Laser-induced nuclear processes in ultra-dense hydrogen H(0) give ejection of bunches of mesons similar to known baryon annihilation processes. This process was recently described as useful for relativistic interstellar travel (Holmlid and Zeiner-Gundersen 2020) and more precise experimental results exist now. The mesons are identified from their known decay time constants at rest as slow charged kaons slow neutral long-lived kaons and slow charged pions. Other observed time constants are interpreted as relativistically dilated decays for fast mesons of the same three types with kinetic energy up to 100 MeV for the kaons. Mouns are observed with kinetic energy of >100 MeV as decay products from the mesons. These particle energies are much too high to be due to nuclear fusion in hydrogen and the only known process which can give such energies is baryon annihilation. A model of the annihilation process starting with two protons or two neutrons gives good agreement with the observed meson types and their masses and kinetic energies thus now giving the complete energetics of the process. The process works with both D(0) and p(0). The efficiency from mass (of two baryons) to useful energy is 46% (contrary to 0.3% for T + D fusion) and the main non-recoverable energy loss is to neutrinos. Neutrons are not formed or ejected so this is an aneutronic process. The energy which can be extracted from ordinary hydrogen is 11.4 TWh per kg. This annihilation method is well suited for small and medium energy applications in the kW to MW range but scaling-up to GW power stations requires further development. It is unlikely that this energy production method can be used for weapons since there is no ignition or chain reaction.

Objectives

The aim of this review is to establish which available literature may be of use as part of the HSE funded project which will investigate spontaneous ignition of accidental hydrogen releases (JR02071). It will identify  phenomena that have the potential to cause spontaneous ignition of releases of pressured hydrogen and identify literature that may be of use when formulating the experimental program.

Main Findings

The identification of important work that shows conclusive evidence of spontaneous ignition of hydrogen due to the failure of a boundary layer.

The Government’s recently published ‘Road to Zero’ strategy sets out objectives to electrify cars and reduce emissions from heavy goods vehicles (HGVs) through policies such as ending the sale of diesel and petrol cars and subsidising electric charging infrastructure. The CCC response to the strategy however stated that the proposed measures do not go far enough. New Government policies combined with action from industry will be required for mobility related carbon reduction targets to be met.<br/>Hydrogen has been identified by the Government and CCC as one potential solution. The CCC report on a possible future hydrogen economy recognises that in particular hydrogen may have an important role to play for long distance journeys and heavy goods transport. This view was echoed further in the recent CCC ‘Net Zero’ report.<br/>Cadent’s HyNet project will produce low carbon hydrogen through reformation of natural gas combined with carbon capture utilisation and storage (CCUS). HyNet has primarily been designed to supply low carbon heat to industry and a blend of hydrogen to Cadent’s existing natural gas network but also provides the opportunity to supply low cost hydrogen for mobility. The HyMotion project has considered the relative merits of such an approach modelled potential demand scenarios and sought to determine technical and commercial solutions to enable deployment.<br/>Hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs) share powertrain technologies with battery electric vehicles (BEVs) but the roll-out of BEVs is currently ahead of FCEVs. This is largely due to a lack of low cost low carbon bulk hydrogen production and refuelling infrastructure both of which HyNet seeks to address.

Bamboo-like nitrogen-doped carbon nanotubes (N-CNTs) were used to synthesize supported palladium catalysts (0.2–2 wt.%) for hydrogen production via gas phase formic acid decomposition. The beneficial role of nitrogen centers of N-CNTs in the formation of active isolated palladium ions and dispersed palladium nanoparticles was demonstrated. It was shown that although the surface layers of N-CNTs are enriched with graphitic nitrogen palladium first interacts with accessible pyridinic centers of N-CNTs to form stable isolated palladium ions. The activity of Pd/N-CNTs catalysts is determined by the ionic capacity of N-CNTs and dispersion of metallic nanoparticles stabilized on the nitrogen centers. The maximum activity was observed for the 0.2% Pd/N-CNTs catalyst consisting of isolated palladium ions. A ten-fold increase in the concentration of supported palladium increased the contribution of metallic nanoparticles with a mean size of 1.3 nm and decreased the reaction rate by only a factor of 1.4.

Hydrogen when based on renewable electricity can play a key role in the transition towards CO2-neutral industrial production since its use as an energy carrier as well as a feedstock in various industrial process routes is promising. At the same time a large-scale roll-out of hydrogen for industrial use would entail substantial impacts on the energy system which can only be assessed if the regional distribution of future hydrogen demand is considered. Here we assess the technical potential of hydrogen-based technologies for energy-intensive industries in Germany. The site-specific and process-specific bottom-up calculation considers 615 individual plants at 367 sites and results in a total potential hydrogen demand of 326 TWh/a. The results are available as an open dataset. Using hydrogen for non-energy-intensive sectors as well increases the potential hydrogen demand to between 482 and 534 TWh/a for Germany - based on today’s industrial structure and production output. This assumes that fossil fuels are almost completely replaced by hydrogen for process heating and feedstocks. The resulting hydrogen demand is very unevenly distributed: a few sites account for the majority of the overall potential and similarly the bulk of demand is concentrated in a few regions with steel and chemical clusters.

The current requirements for composite cylinders are still based on an arbitrary approach derived from the behaviour of metal structures that the designed burst pressure should be at least 2.5 times the maximum in-service pressure. This could lead to an over-designed composite cylinder for which the weight saving would be less than optimum. Moreover predicting the lifetime of composite cylinders is a challenging task due to their anisotropic characteristics. A federal research institute in Germany (BAM) has proposed a minimum load-cycle requirement that mitigates this issue by using a MonteCarlo analysis of the burst test results. To enrich this study more experiments are required however they are normally limited by the necessity of long duration testing times (loading rate and number of cylinders) and the design (stacking sequence of the composite layer). A multi-scale model incorporating the micromechanical behaviour of composite structures has been developed at Mines ParisTech. The model has shown similar behaviour to that of composite cylinders under different loading rates. This indicates that the model could assist the Monte-Carlo analysis study. An evaluation of the multi-scale model therefore has been carried out to determine its limitations in predicting lifetimes of composite cylinders. The evaluation starts with the comparison of burst pressures with type IV composite cylinders under different loading rates. A μCT-Scan of a type IV cylinder has been carried out at the University of Southampton. The produced images were analysed using the Fast-Fourier Transform (FFT) technique to determine the configuration of the composite layers which is required by the model. Finally the time dependent effect studied by using the multi scale model has been described. In the long-term this study can be used to conduct a parametric study for creating more efficient design of type IV cylinders.

This paper presents an optimization modeling approach to support strategic planning for designing hydrogen supply chain (HSC) networks. The energy source for hydrogen production is proposed to be electricity generated at Mexican sugar factories. This study considers the utilization of existing infrastructure in strategic areas of the country which brings several advantages in terms of possible solutions. This study aims to evaluate the economic and environmental implications of using biomass wastes for energy generation and its integration to the national energy grid where the problem is addressed as a mixed-integer linear program (MILP) adopting maximization of annual profit and minimization of greenhouse gas emissions as optimization criteria. Input data is provided by sugar companies and the national transport and energy information platform and were represented by probability distributions to consider variability in key parameters. Independent solutions show similarities in terms of resource utilization while also significant differences regarding economic and environmental indicators. Multi-objective optimization was performed by a genetic algorithm (GA). The optimal HSC network configuration is selected using a multi-criteria decision technique i.e. TOPSIS. An uncertainty analysis is performed and main economic indicators are estimated by investment assessment. Main results show the trade-off interactions between the HSC elements and optimization criteria. The average internal rate of return (IRR) is estimated to be 21.5% and average payback period is 5.02 years.