TY - JOUR
T1 - Purification of hydrogen from natural gas/hydrogen pipeline mixtures
AU - Dehdari, Leila
AU - Burgers, Iris
AU - Xiao, Penny
AU - Li, Kevin Gang
AU - Singh, Ranjeet
AU - Webley, Paul A.
N1 - Funding Information:
This work is funded by the Future Fuels CRC ?Novel Hydrogen/Methane Separation Technology Development (RP1.3-02)?, supported through the Australian Government's Cooperative Research Centres Program. We gratefully acknowledge the cash and in-kind support from all our research, government and industry participants. We would like to thank Klaas van Alphen (FFCRC), Nick Kastelein (FFCRC), Rachelle Doyle (Woodside), Robert Ashley (Woodside), Boon Liaw (Woodside), Larissa Villas-Boas (Jemena), Andrew Walker (Jemena), Craig Clarke (APA Group), Daniel Krosch (GPA Engineering) for their guiding insights during this research.
Funding Information:
The authors declare the following financial interests/personal relationships which may be considered as potential competing interests: Leila Dehdari and Penny Xiao reports financial support was provided by Future Fuels CRC.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Elsevier B.V.
PY - 2022/2/1
Y1 - 2022/2/1
N2 - There is an increasing global attention toward hydrogen as a green energy carrier, primarily because of the environmental concerns associated with global warming issues. It is expected that the produced hydrogen from various sources may be injected to the natural gas grid for economical transportation and use. One interesting option is to evaluate technologies for extracting the hydrogen from the natural gas pipeline for applications using high purity hydrogen. However, natural gas is a complex mixture including CH4, C2H6, CO2, N2 and trace amounts of C3-C6 hydrocarbons. This function requires a natural gas/hydrogen separation technology which must not only operate with low capital and energy cost, but must also provide hydrogen of sufficient purity. The goal of current work therefore was to take a mixture of hydrogen/natural gas of representative concentrations and produce high purity hydrogen using a bespoke pressure swing adsorption (PSA) cycle. A six-bed PSA system with 12 steps was developed and simulated in Aspen Adsorption software to this end. A three-layered adsorption column was designed to capture different groups of components of the mixture selectively within each layer. Informed by measured and literature equilibrium isotherm data, silica gel was chosen as the pre-layer to remove heavy hydrocarbon components and most of the CO2; activated carbon in the main-layer to mainly adsorb methane, and LiLSX zeolite in the top-layer to remove trace nitrogen which had eluted from the earlier layers, for obtaining pure hydrogen product. High purity hydrogen product (>99%) with high recovery (>85%) was achieved with the PSA system for different hydrogen concentrations (5–30%) in the 30 bar feed stream. We also compared the PSA system against an electrolyzer generating hydrogen onsite. Our analysis suggests that the PSA competes favorably, even at a low hydrogen recovery of 40% in cases where the PSA plant is built at a pressure reduction station.
AB - There is an increasing global attention toward hydrogen as a green energy carrier, primarily because of the environmental concerns associated with global warming issues. It is expected that the produced hydrogen from various sources may be injected to the natural gas grid for economical transportation and use. One interesting option is to evaluate technologies for extracting the hydrogen from the natural gas pipeline for applications using high purity hydrogen. However, natural gas is a complex mixture including CH4, C2H6, CO2, N2 and trace amounts of C3-C6 hydrocarbons. This function requires a natural gas/hydrogen separation technology which must not only operate with low capital and energy cost, but must also provide hydrogen of sufficient purity. The goal of current work therefore was to take a mixture of hydrogen/natural gas of representative concentrations and produce high purity hydrogen using a bespoke pressure swing adsorption (PSA) cycle. A six-bed PSA system with 12 steps was developed and simulated in Aspen Adsorption software to this end. A three-layered adsorption column was designed to capture different groups of components of the mixture selectively within each layer. Informed by measured and literature equilibrium isotherm data, silica gel was chosen as the pre-layer to remove heavy hydrocarbon components and most of the CO2; activated carbon in the main-layer to mainly adsorb methane, and LiLSX zeolite in the top-layer to remove trace nitrogen which had eluted from the earlier layers, for obtaining pure hydrogen product. High purity hydrogen product (>99%) with high recovery (>85%) was achieved with the PSA system for different hydrogen concentrations (5–30%) in the 30 bar feed stream. We also compared the PSA system against an electrolyzer generating hydrogen onsite. Our analysis suggests that the PSA competes favorably, even at a low hydrogen recovery of 40% in cases where the PSA plant is built at a pressure reduction station.
KW - Energy efficiency
KW - Equilibrium isotherm
KW - Hydrogen separation
KW - Natural gas infrastructure
KW - PSA
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85118898878&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.seppur.2021.120094
DO - 10.1016/j.seppur.2021.120094
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85118898878
VL - 282
JO - Separation and Purification Technology
JF - Separation and Purification Technology
SN - 1383-5866
M1 - 120094
ER -