Abstract
‘Hydrogen as the energy carrier of the future’ has been a topic discussed for decades and is today the subject of a new revival, especially driven by the investments in renewable electricity and the technological efforts done by high-developed industrial powers, such as Northern Europe and Japan. Although hydrogen production from renewable resources is still limited to small scale, local solutions, and R&D projects; steam reforming (SR) of natural gas at industrial scale is the cheapest and most used technology and generates around 8 kg CO2 per kg H2. This paper is focused on the process optimization and decarbonization of H2 production from fossil fuels to promote more efficient approaches based on membrane separation. In this work, two emerging configurations have been compared from the numerical point of view: the membrane reactor (MR) and the reformer and membrane module (RMM), proposed and tested by this research group. The rate of hydrogen production by SR has been calculated according to other literature works, a one-dimensional model has been developed for mass, heat, and momentum balances. For the membrane modules, the rate of hydrogen permeation has been estimated according to mass transfer correlation previously reported by this research group and based on previous experimental tests carried on in the first RMM Pilot Plant. The methane conversion, carbon dioxide yield, temperature, and pressure profile are compared for each configuration: SR, MR, and RMM. By decoupling the reaction and separation section, such as in the RMM, the overall methane conversion can be increased of about 30% improving the efficiency of the system.
Highlights
Hydrogen is widely used in industrial sector such as oil refining, ammonia and methanol synthesis, iron and steel production [1], and its production has fourfold from 1975 to 2018, reaching 115 Mton/y.Nowadays, over 95% of hydrogen is obtained from fossil fuels, releasing about 830 million tons of carbon dioxide per year [2].The 48% of current hydrogen production is via steam reforming of natural gas (SR), 30% via petroleum fraction, 18% via coal gasification, and only 4% via electrolysis due to the still high cost of production (2.50–5.30 US$/gge against 1.33–2.30 US$/gge of steam reformer (SR)) [3,4,5,6]
A commercial steam reformer tube has been simulated according to Xu and Froment data and the main geometrical characteristics and operating conditions are summarized in the Table 2
Steam reformer of natural gas is still the most common and cheapest way to produce hydrogen; hydrogen from renewable resources is expensive compared to fossil fuels and except for biomass gasification, the current technologies are at laboratory scale
Summary
Giovanni Franchi 1, * , Mauro Capocelli 1 , Marcello De Falco 1 , Vincenzo Piemonte 2 and. Hydrogen production from renewable resources is still limited to small scale, local solutions, and R&D projects; steam reforming (SR) of natural gas at industrial scale is the cheapest and most used technology and generates around 8 kg CO2 per kg H2. Two emerging configurations have been compared from the numerical point of view: the membrane reactor (MR) and the reformer and membrane module (RMM), proposed and tested by this research group. The rate of hydrogen production by SR has been calculated according to other literature works, a one-dimensional model has been developed for mass, heat, and momentum balances. The rate of hydrogen permeation has been estimated according to mass transfer correlation previously reported by this research group and based on previous experimental tests carried on in the first RMM Pilot.
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