Australian turquoise hydrogen pilot passes ten-day mark of continuous 24/7 operation
Australian turquoise hydrogen developer Hazer Group has announced that its commercial demonstration plant has passed ten days of continuous round-the-clock operation, a milestone which unlocks its next tranche of government funding and adds to its case for launching the technology to the market this year.
Like incumbent “grey” hydrogen, turquoise H2 is produced from natural gas feedstock. However, while grey hydrogen is generated by splitting methane with steam, resulting in CO2 emissions, turquoise H2 is made via methane pyrolysis, which splits apart the molecule with heat in the absence of air, resulting in only solid carbon as a byproduct.
Depending on the region, gas as a feedstock can be much cheaper than the electricity needed to run electrolysis for green hydrogen production.
Meanwhile, byproduct carbon could be sold as graphite to existing markets, offsetting the cost of production and making turquoise H2 theoretically one of the cheapest low-carbon hydrogen production pathways — although some critics have questioned whether the market for solid carbon is big enough to absorb a lot of extra supply.
Hazer started producing hydrogen and solid carbon at its pilot project near Perth, Western Australia, in January this year, which uses biomethane from an adjacent wastewater treatment plant (ie, from sewage sludge) as a feedstock to make around 100 tonnes of H2 and 380 tonnes of synthetic graphite a year.
The ten days of continuous operation was one of the key milestones that the plant had to pass in order for the developer to access its next tranche of public funding from January next year via the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, which had allocated A$9.41m ($6.2m) in total.
Hazer’s commercial demonstration plant has been expected to cost A$23m-25m.
The Hazer process works by heating methane to about 900°C inside a fluidised bed reactor in the presence of sand-like particles of iron ore, but no air (which prevents the formation of CO2). This high-temperature heat turns the iron ore into nanoparticles, and the methane decomposes into hydrogen and graphite, the latter of which forms on the surface of the nanoparticles.
The resulting powder is 80-95% graphite, which can then be separated and sold to existing markets for this type of solid carbon such as lithium-ion battery production.
Hazer announced that during the ten days of continuous operation, it saw “stable and reliable solids separation from product gas stream” and “operational reliability with process uptime above target” of 97.5%.
However, it noted that it still has to optimise current operations in order to produce “commercially representative” graphite, which would have to undergo quality verification prior to distribution to industrial partners for large-scale testing and analysis.
Hazer also highlighted four existing commercial projects with South Korean conglomerate POSCO, a consortium of Japanese firms Chubu Electric and Chiyoda, French energy company Engie, and Canadian utility FortisBC, noting that it still plans to “declare commercial readiness” for its technology this year.
Source: HydrogenInsight