Reducing CO2 emissions with improved hydrogen recovery processes

IDRIC Project 7.5

 
University of South Wales
TATA Steel
Sustainable Environment Research Centre

Background

As part of the transition to fully decarbonize steelmaking and other processes, this project aims to investigate a Sorption Enhanced Water Gas Shift (SEWGS) process route, to discover optimal technical configurations and provide greater understanding of the potential economics of adopting a SEWGS for hydrogen and carbon dioxide recovery.

Jon Maddy

Jon Maddy

Principal Investigator
University of South Wales

Aim

The SEWGS approach is also applicable to many thermochemical hydrogen production routes and could enhance steam methane reforming, autothermal reforming and partial oxidation, as well as biomass-based processes that derive syngas intermediate streams. Standard water gas shift is well known and widely applied to increase hydrogen yield from syngas streams in a range of process plant and is currently being considered to assist with decarbonization, particularly for the Port Talbot steel works. However, SEWGS potentially offers significant efficiency improvements beyond standard WGS and therefore a putative operating cost reduction of ~25% compared with a standard approach. The project proposed includes detailed process and economic modelling to optimize the SEWGS application. It also builds on current research at the University of South Wales’ Hydrogen Centre to experiment on optimal hydrogen purification from the SEWGS process with efficient electrochemical compression to derive a high purity, high pressure hydrogen product.  

Case Study

ISCF IDC Deployment Phase 2