Institution of Gas Engineers & Managers

The Global Hydrogen Review is an annual publication by the International Energy Agency that tracks hydrogen production and demand worldwide as well as progress in critical areas such as infrastructure development trade policy regulation investments and innovation.

The report is an output of the Clean Energy Ministerial Hydrogen Initiative and is intended to inform energy sector stakeholders on the status and future prospects of hydrogen while also informing discussions at the Hydrogen Energy Ministerial Meeting organised by Japan. Focusing on hydrogen’s potentially major role in meeting international energy and climate goals this year’s Review aims to help decision makers fine-tune strategies to attract investment and facilitate deployment of hydrogen technologies while also creating demand for hydrogen and hydrogen-based fuels. It compares real-world developments with the stated ambitions of government and industry.

This year’s report includes a special focus on how the global energy crisis sparked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has accelerated the momentum behind hydrogen and on the opportunities that it offers to simultaneously contribute to decarbonisation targets and enhance energy security.

The report can be found on their website.

The energy transition with transformation into predominantly renewable sources requires technology development to secure power production at all times despite the intermittent nature of the renewables. Micro gas turbines (MGTs) are small heat and power generation units with fast startup and load-following capability and are thereby suitable backup for the future’s decentralized power generation systems. Due to MGTs’ fuel flexibility a range of fuels from high-heat to lowheat content could be utilized with different greenhouse gas generation. Developing micro gas turbines that can operate with carbon-free fuels will guarantee carbon-free power production with zero CO2 emission and will contribute to the alleviation of the global warming problem. In this paper the redevelopment of a standard 100-kW micro gas turbine to run with methane/hydrogen blended fuel is presented. Enabling micro gas turbines to run with hydrogen blended fuels has been pursued by researchers for decades. The first micro gas turbine running with pure hydrogen was developed in Stavanger Norway and launched in May 2022. This was achieved through a collaboration between the University of Stavanger (UiS) and the German Aerospace Centre (DLR). This paper provides an overview of the project and reports the experimental results from the engine operating with methane/hydrogen blended fuel with various hydrogen content up to 100%. During the development process the MGT’s original combustor was replaced with an innovative design to deal with the challenges of burning hydrogen. The fuel train was replaced with a mixing unit new fuel valves and an additional controller that enables the required energy input to maintain the maximum power output independent of the fuel blend specification. This paper presents the test rig setup and the preliminary results of the test campaign which verifies the capability of the MGT unit to support intermittent renewable generation with minimum greenhouse gas production. Results from the MGT operating with blended methane/hydrogen fuel are provided in the paper. The hydrogen content varied from 50% to 100% (volume-based) and power outputs between 35 kW to 100kW were tested. The modifications of the engine mainly the new combustor fuel train valve settings and controller resulted in a stable operation of the MGT with NOx emissions below the allowed limits. Running the engine with pure hydrogen at full load has resulted in less than 25 ppm of NOx emissions with zero carbon-based greenhouse gas production.

Environmental issues related to greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions have pushed the development of new technologies that will allow the economic production of low-carbon energy vectors such as hydrogen (H2 ) methane (CH4 ) and liquid fuels. Dry reforming of methane (DRM) has gained increased attention since it uses CH4 and carbon dioxide (CO2 ) which are two main greenhouse gases (GHG) as feedstock for the production of syngas which is a mixture of H2 and carbon monoxide (CO) and can be used as a building block for the production of fuels. Since H2 has been identified as a key enabler of the energy transition a lot of studies have aimed to benefit from the environmental advantages of DRM and to use it as a pathway for a sustainable H2 production. However there are several challenges related to this process and to its use for H2 production such as catalyst deactivation and the low H2/CO ratio of the syngas produced which is usually below 1.0. This paper presents the recent advances in the catalyst development for H2 production via DRM the processes that could be combined with DRM to overcome these challenges and the current industrial processes using DRM. The objective is to assess in which conditions DRM could be used for H2 production and the gaps in literature data preventing better evaluation of the environmental and economic potential of this process.

Catalytic decomposition of methane (CDM) is a novel technology for turquoise hydrogen production with solid carbon as the by-product instead of CO2. A computational fluid dynamics model was developed to simulate the CDM process in a 3D fixed bed reactor accounting for the impact of carbon deposition on catalytic activity. The model was validated with experimental data and demonstrated its capability to predict hydrogen concentration and catalyst deactivation time under varying operating temperatures and methane flow rates. The catalyst lifespan was characterized by the maximum carbon yield (i.e. gC/gcat) which is a crucial indicator for determining the cost of hydrogen generation. Parametric studies were performed to analyse the effect of inlet gas composition and operating pressure on CDM performance. Various CH4/H2 ratios were simulated to improve the methane conversion efficiency generating a higher amount of hydrogen while increasing the maximum carbon yield up to 49.5 gC/gcat. Additionally higher operating pressure resulted in higher methane decomposition rates which reflects the nature of the chemical kinetics.

This work investigates the environmental and economic performances of a membrane reactor for hydrogen production from raw biogas. Potential benefits of the innovative technology are compared against reference hydrogen production processes based on steam (or autothermal) reforming water gas shift reactors and a pressure swing adsorption unit. Both biogas produced by landfill and anaerobic digestion are considered to evaluate the impact of biogas composition. Starting from the thermodynamic results the environmental analysis is carried out using environmental Life cycle assessment (LCA). Results show that the adoption of the membrane reactor increases the system efficiency by more than 20 percentage points with respect to the reference cases. LCA analysis shows that the innovative BIONICO system performs better than reference systems when biogas becomes a limiting factor for hydrogen production to satisfy market demand as a higher biogas conversion efficiency can potentially substitute more hydrogen produced by fossil fuels (natural gas). However when biogas is not a limiting factor for hydrogen production the innovative system can perform either similar or worse than reference systems as in this case impacts are largely dominated by grid electric energy demand and component use rather than conversion efficiency. Focusing on the economic results hydrogen production cost shows lower value with respect to the reference cases (4 €/kgH2 vs 4.2 €/kgH2) at the same hydrogen delivery pressure of 20 bar. Between landfill and anaerobic digestion cases the latter has the lower costs as a consequence of the higher methane content.

The intermittent nature of renewable energy resources such as wind and solar causes the energy supply to be less predictable leading to possible mismatches in the power network. To this end hydrogen production and storage can provide a solution by increasing flexibility within the system. Stored hydrogen as compressed gas can either be converted back to electricity or it can be used as feed-stock for industry heating for built environment and as fuel for vehicles. This research is the first to examine optimal strategies for operating integrated energy systems consisting of renewable energy production and hydrogen storage with direct gas-based use-cases for hydrogen. Using Markov decision process theory we construct optimal policies for day-to-day decisions on how much energy to store as hydrogen or buy from or sell to the electricity market and on how much hydrogen to sell for use as gas. We pay special emphasis to practical settings such as contractually binding power purchase agreements varying electricity prices different distribution channels green hydrogen offtake agreements and hydrogen market price uncertainties. Extensive experiments and analysis are performed in the context of Northern Netherlands where Europe’s first Hydrogen Valley is being formed. Results show that gains in operational revenues of up to 51% are possible by introducing hydrogen storage units and competitive hydrogen market-prices. This amounts to a e126000 increase in revenues per turbine per year for a 4.5 MW wind turbine. Moreover our results indicate that hydrogen offtake agreements will be crucial in keeping the energy transition on track.

This review article deals with the challenge to identify catalyst materials from literature studies for the ammonia decomposition reaction with potential for application in large-scale industrial processes. On the one hand the requirements on the catalyst are quite demanding. Of central importance are the conditions for the primary reaction that have to be met by the catalyst. Likewise the catalytic performance i.e. an ideally quantitative conversion and a high lifetime are critical as well as the consideration of requirements on the product properties in terms of pressure or by-products for potential follow-up processes in this case synthesis gas applications. On the other hand the evaluation of the multitude of literature studies poses difficulties due to significant varieties in catalytic testing protocols.

Unstable hydrogen-air flame behavior randomities are important for industrial safety hydrogen infrastructure safety and nuclear power plant hydrogen safety problems. The paper is devoted to an experimental and theoretical study of the uncertainty in the acceleration of a premixed laminar unstable hydrogen flame. The results of experiments on spherical flame propagation in hydrogen-air mixtures with a hydrogen content of 10 to 60% are presented. The experiments were repeated up to 30 times in the same mixtures. A statistical analysis of the experimental results has been carried out. The scatter of the experimental data depending on the hydrogen content in the mixture was estimated. It was found to be between 8 to 17% for different mixtures with the same flame radius and mixture composition. Similar results were obtained using the numerical integration of the Sivashinsky equation of flame propagation.

Solar-to-hydrogen plants are predominantly based on steam electrolysis. Steam electrolysis requires water electricity and heat. The excess electric energy is generally converted into hydrogen via an electrolyser. The use of waste heat in hydrogen generation process promises energy efficiency improvement and production fluctuation reductions. This work investigates the techno-economic performance of the proposed system which recovers the waste heat from molten carbonate fuel cell and uses solar energy to produce steam. Comparison of thermally assisted solar system with corresponding solar system is done. The fuel cell provides 80% of the required thermal energy. The solar PV array provides the required electricity. The thermally assisted solar-to-hydrogen system annual energy efficiency (38.5 %) is higher than that of solar- to- hydrogen system. The investment cost of the proposed system is 2.4 % higher than that using only solar parabolic trough collector for the same required amount of heat. The advantage is that the fuel cell simultaneously produces electricity and heat. The recovery of waste heat allows getting an annual overall efficiency of 63.2 % for the molten carbonate fuel cell. It yields 2152 MWh of electricity per year. The 1 MW electrolysers annually generates 74 tonnes of hydrogen.

We had investigated feasible measures to reduce CO2 emission and came to conclusion that introduction of new fuel such as hydrogen with near zero CO2 emission is required for achieving Japan’s commitment of 80% CO2 reduction by 2050. Under this background we are proposing and aiming to realize “CO2 free hydrogen chain” utilizing Australian brown coal linked with CCS. In this chain hydrogen produced from brown coal is liquefied and transported to Japan by liquid hydrogen carrier. We have conducted feasibility study of commercial scale “CO2 free hydrogen chain” whose result shows the chain is technically and economically feasible.