A comprehensive review on hydrogen production and utilization in North America: Prospects and challenges

Abstract

Hydrogen is one of the most efficient and attractive energy carriers that can fulfill current and future energy requirements and address the drawbacks of conventional energy resources. Hydrogen as a fuel is nonmetallic, carbon-free, non-toxic, and has higher specific energy than gasoline (on a mass basis). Hydrogen production, storage, safety, and utilization are the four main aspects that should be considered in hydrogen energy-based systems. This review extensively analyzes the literature on fundamental, technological, and environmental aspects of various hydrogen applications and production techniques as well as theoretical and practical challenges. The global demand for hydrogen is mainly for its utilization in oil refineries (33%), chemical production (40%), metallurgical industries (3%), and the rest is in applications such as fuel, glass manufacturing, welding processes, and food industries. Natural gas, crude oil, coal, and electrolysis processes are the main feedstock sources for hydrogen production, with shares of 49, 29, 18, and 4%, respectively. Currently, hydrocarbon and alcohol reforming, gasification (coal and fossil fuels), and fossil fuel partial oxidation have the greatest shares of the hydrogen production methods. The main challenges for these methods are the high total energy consumption and carbon emissions to the environment. Water electrolysis technologies are still under development and can be combined with renewable energy resources, such as solar, geothermal, wind, and tidal to achieve eco-friendly technologies. Biohydrogen production through biological approaches such as direct and indirect biophotolysis, and photo and dark fermentation processes can be sustainable and promising technologies for bioenergy production worldwide. This review investigates the various thermochemical cycles for hydrogen production and presents the process flow diagram of each cycle. It discusses the different chemical and physical methods and materials for hydrogen storage. In fact, hydrogen storage materials are still lacking in both volumetric and gravimetric density, and in some cases, they do not have promising storage capacity. The current status of hydrogen production, available resources, various challenges in the field of hydrogen production, storage and transportation, and government regulations in North America are discussed.