A novel electrified sorption enhanced reforming process for blue hydrogen production†

Abstract

Sorption enhanced reforming (SER) is emerging as a promising solution for the deployment of blue hydrogen and offers the flexibility to accommodate future green feedstocks. This study assesses the techno-economic feasibility of implementing electrified reactors for the endothermic sorbent regeneration step in SER-based hydrogen production plants, introducing the novel electrified sorption enhanced reforming (eSER) process. The analysis is conducted by integrating a 1-D dynamic heterogeneous model of an adiabatic fixed bed reactor into a process model of the complete plant. A natural gas-based hydrogen production plant with 30 000 Nm³ h⁻¹ capacity is considered, simulating five different cases, two of which are advanced plant configurations designed to capture more than 90% of the feed carbon. Evaluating a set of key performance indicators that covers technical, environmental, and economic aspects of the process, these simulated cases are benchmarked against existing studies utilizing conventional and state of the art steam methane reforming with carbon capture technology from the literature. The findings highlight the remarkable performance of eSER, achieving specific electric consumption of 12–14 kW h per kg_H2 and natural gas to H₂ conversion efficiency exceeding 100% calculated on a chemical energy basis. For the base case configuration, an overall energy efficiency of the eSER process of 74.3% and a CO₂ capture rate of 86.3% are computed. For the advanced configurations, energy efficiency of 73.7% and 73.1%, CO₂ capture rates of 90.3 and 96.6% and levelized cost of hydrogen of 2.50 and 2.52 € per kg_H2 have been obtained.