Techno-economic study on carbon negative biohydrogen potential in Australia to tackle climate change

Techno-economic study on carbon negative biohydrogen potential in Australia to tackle climate change

Project Outline (up to 200 words):

Hydrogen is a versatile energy carrier and a feedstock chemical with applications across energy and industrial sectors. Countries like Japan and South Korea have started transitioning towards a Hydrogen Economy to enable carbon neutral energy utilisation. Australia is also following their footsteps with projects like the Hydrogen Energy Supply Chain (HESC) in the Latrobe Valley.

While the HESC project will produce carbon neutral hydrogen from brown coal via underground CO2 sequestration, the aim of this project is to investigate carbon negative biohydrogen production. This will be achieved by utilisation of non-food biomass as a feed and sequestering the waste CO2. The hydrogen produced can be used to supplement the gas grid, to generate power or for export. This desktop study will be of interest to the energy and chemical industries and project partners of the HESC project.

Scope of the project includes:

  • Literature review and selection of the main processes, biomass resources and CO2 sequestration sites;
  • Development of the technical model/s for biohydrogen production and CO2 sequestration;
  • Simulation of the model/s;
  • Techno-economic assessment for nation-wide carbon negative biohydrogen production; and
  • Recommendations based on the results.

Resources: Simulation software (e.g., ASPEN, gPROMS or COCO-ChemSep)

Project Supervision Team

Dr. Adeel Ghayur (Techno-Economic Assessment); A/Prof Vince Verheyen (Chemistry);

Vince brings experience with PhD supervision and chemistry skills experience. Adeel brings techno-economic simulation experience.

ERA: Environmental science and management

Research centre: Carbon Technology Research Centre/Civil and Power Engineering

References

Ghayur, A., & Verheyen, T. V. (2018). Technical evaluation of post-combustion CO2 capture and hydrogen production industrial symbiosis. International Journal of Hydrogen Energy, 43(30), 13852-13859.

Ghayur, A., & Verheyen, V. (2019). Increasing hydrogen energy efficiency by heat integration between fuel cell, hydride tank and electrolyser. In IEEE CSDE/ i-COSTE 2019, Melbourne, Australia (in press)

Ghayur, A., Verheyen, T. V., & Meuleman, E. (2019). Techno-economic analysis of a succinic acid biorefinery coproducing acetic acid and dimethyl ether. Journal of Cleaner Production, 230, 1165-1175.