Wade A. Amos’s research while affiliated with National Renewable Energy Laboratory and other places

Producing hydrogen in a cost-effective manner while minimizing environmental impacts is a big challenge. Hydrogen can be generated with carbon as a by-product from thermal decomposition of natural gas. A system using a solar reactor to produce hydrogen on-site for fueling stations was examined for its technical and economic feasibility. Integrated energy and material balance calculations were made to determine the amount of hydrogen that could be produced from a given reactor size and heliostat field area. Hourly solar data were applied to the model to properly estimate real storage requirements. This paper gives the results of the study including the greenhouse gas emissions and energy balance.

Hydrogen production via thermal decomposition of methane using a solar reactor is analyzed for two different applications: (1) for a fueling station and (2) for power production. For the fueling station, the selling price of hydrogen is controlled by the high cost of hydrogen storage and compression, combined with storage limitations of the system, which prevents maximum hydrogen production. Two alternate scenarios to lower the hydrogen production cost are evaluated: (1) sending the hydrogen directly to a pipeline network and (2) adding a small electric heater, which provides heat to the solar reactor when the hydrogen supply is low. For power production, the economics of two options for the carbon produced from the solar process are evaluated: (1) selling the carbon black and (2) burning the carbon to produce more power.

Milestone report summarizing the economic feasibility of producing hydrogen from biomass via (1) gasification/reforming of the resulting syngas and (2) fast pyrolysis/reforming of the resulting bio-oil. Hydrogen has the potential to be a clean alternative to the fossil fuels currently used in the transportation sector. This is especially true if the hydrogen is manufactured from renewable resources, primarily sunlight, wind, and biomass. Analyses have been conducted to assess the economic feasibility of producing hydrogen from biomass via two thermochemical processes: (1) gasification followed by reforming of the syngas, and (2) fast pyrolysis followed by reforming of the carbohydrate fraction of the bio-oil. This study was conducted to update previous analyses of these processes in order to include recent experimental advances and any changes in direction from previous analyses. The systems examined were gasification in the Battelle/FERCO low pressure indirectly-heated gasifier followed by steam reforming, gasification in the Institute of Gas Technology (IGT) high pressure direct-fired gasifier followed by steam reforming, and pyrolysis followed by coproduct separation and steam reforming. In each process, water-gas shift is used to convert the reformed gas into hydrogen, and pressure swing adsorption is used to purify the product. The delivered cost of hydrogen, as well as the plant gate hydrogen selling price, were determined. All analyses included Latin Hypercube sampling to obtain a detailed sensitivity analysis.