.
-
An energy developer is planning to build a "green hydrogen" facility in Southern California, that can convert waste material into hydrogen
-
The plant will process 40,000 tons of waste every year, and have the capacity to produce up to 3.8 million kilograms of hydrogen per year, the company, SGH2 Energy, announced Wednesday. It intends to sell the output to owners of hydrogen refueling stations in the state.
-
Clean hydrogen is likely to play a big role in deep decarbonization, Rachel Fakhry, policy analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council's climate and clean energy program, told Utility Dive. "It's important that state policy-makers start valuing that potential role, and thinking about the right policies to get us there to scale up the industry," she added.
|
source: Kavya Balaraman,
utilitydive.com, May 21, 2020
A little background on a past hydrogen project 100 miles from there : starting in 2013, HECA (Hydrogen Energy California) met considerable resistance in the southern San Joaquin valley, notably in the form of a coalition of what we might call unusual partners —farmers, environmentalists, suburbanites, etc— geographically closest to HECA’s intended gasification site in Kern County. The activists collected a fair amount of participation for rallies and testimony at public hearings, e-comments for the record, news reports of the moment on every iota of development with the project or their resistance, published and distributed by the activists themselves when local news failed to produce coverage.
Their aim was to get HECA shut down before it started because of the massive amounts of coal from New Mexico planned for a new rail line operating daily, inorganic fertilizer side production and transport, Oxy’s intention to inject gasification-generated CO2 into their local older oil wells —carbon dixide flooding— to increase production. And water pollution, carcinogens, air pollution, the works, and then some.
I’m not sure if the resistance was what succeeded, but according to wikipedia, the project fell through in 2017! Yay!
Now, for good or ill, there are a lot of news reports this week about this big hydrogen generation plant in the works in Lancaster, California, a Los Angeles County town in the Antelope Valley of the western Mojave Desert. The plant is to be fueled by waste paper and plastics “that would otherwise go into landfill”, using temperatures so high as to eliminate carbons emissions from the process in greater amounts that ever achieved before.
Many world economies are gearing up to make hydrogen a significant part of the [energy future]. Japan and Korea in particular are making big moves and enormous investments to get this zero-local-emissions energy storage format up and running.
Production of hydrogen can vary from the relatively green (electrolysis of fresh water using solar or wind-based energy) to the profoundly filthy (gasification of brown coal) – and the filthiest are by far the cheapest. Adding carbon capture and sequestration to dirty processes simply makes them more expensive.
That's what makes this SGH2 project so interesting – the company claims it can take trash that would otherwise sit in a landfill and rot, and turn it into super-green hydrogen at bargain-basement prices.
According to a recent memorandum of understanding, the city of Lancaster will host and co-own the SGH2 Lancaster plant, which will be capable of producing up to 11,000 kg of H2 per day, or 3.8 million kg per year, while processing up to 42,000 tons of recycled waste per year. Garbage to clean fuel, with a US$2.1 to $3.2 million saving on landfill costs per year as a sweetener…
...The process, developed by SGH2's parent company Solena, uses high-temperature plasma torches putting out temperatures between 3,500 and 4,000 °C (6,332 to 7,232 °F). This ionic heat, with oxygen-enriched gas fed in, catalyzes a "complete molecular dissociation of all hydrocarbons" in whatever fuel you've fed in, and as it rises and begins to cool, it forms "a very high quality, hydrogen-rich bio-syngas free of tar, soot and heavy metals."
The process accepts a wide variety of waste sources, including paper, old tires, textiles, and notably plastics, which it can handle very efficiently without toxic by-products. The bio-syngas exits the top of a plenum chamber, and is sent to a cooling chamber, followed by a pair of acid scrubbers to remove particulate matter.
A centrifugal compressor further cleans the gas stream, leaving a mixture of hydrogen, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. This is run through a water-gas shift reactor that adds water vapor and converts the carbon monoxide to carbon dioxide and more hydrogen gas. The two are separated, neatly capturing all the CO2 as hydrogen comes out the other end.
A Berkeley Lab lifecycle carbon analysis concluded, says SGH2, that each ton of hydrogen produced by this process reduces emissions by between 23 and 31 tons of CO2 equivalent – presumably counting emissions that would be created if the garbage was burned instead of converted into hydrogen. That would be between 13-19 tons more carbon dioxide avoided than any other green hydrogen production process.
What's more, while electrolysis requires some 62 kWh of energy to produce one kilogram of hydrogen, the Solena process is energy-positive, generating 1.8 kWh per kg of hydrogen, meaning the plant generates its own electricity and doesn't require external power input.
The 5-acre facility, in a heavy industrial zone of Lancaster, will employ 35 people full-time and create some 600 jobs in construction. SGH2 is hoping to break ground in Q1 2021 and achieve full operational status by 2023. The company is in negotiations with "California's largest owners and operators of hydrogen refueling stations" to buy the plant's entire output for a 10-year period.
|
Utilitydive.com covered some of the same information — for those of us relatively underschooled in these sciences (such as your author, here), the repetition in different wording may help with comprehension:
The plant is estimated to take 18 months to construct and is scheduled to be fully operational in the first quarter of 2023, after which its output will be sold to hydrogen refueling stations for light and heavy-duty fuel cell vehicles in California, the company said in a press release.
Around 70 million tons of hydrogen is being used around the world today, Robert Do, CEO of SGH2 told Utility Dive, most of which is derived from either natural gas or coal. But the Lancaster plant will instead produce hydrogen by gasifying waste material using plasma torches, an "industrial tool that can raise the heat to very high levels," he explained.
The process produces both carbon monoxide and hydrogen. The latter is separated, purified and sold, while the former is used to generate power to run the plant, so that it runs on its own energy. While the technique does release carbon dioxide into the air, that carbon is "biogenic," meaning it's part of the carbon cycle rather than coming from fossil fuels, Do said.
This technique has several advantages over producing hydrogen through electrolysis, the process of splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, according to Do, including requiring less energy and less land to build a facility. And while the company's current focus is to sell hydrogen for transportation, "there are major needs for hydrogen that [are] not being looked at — number one is to decarbonize California," by injecting it into the gas grid, he added.
The facility is a proof-of-concept plant but if it works as it's supposed to, "I see these all over the nation — if not the world — because it takes care of your waste problem, or certainly puts a dent in it," Rex Parris, mayor of Lancaster, told Utility Dive. He noted that the plant is being built on a five-acre site and is scalable — "wherever you can spare five acres, you can put one of these things up."
Fakhry concurred that hydrogen can play a huge role in the clean energy transition. Currently, hydrogen is mostly used in refining, as well as agriculture, she said. But the resource is also being touted as a potential big player in decarbonization, for two reasons: It has very high energy density, and shares some characteristics with fossil fuels — like allowing for long-duration storage — but can also be a zero or low emission resource.
The biggest value for hydrogen is likely to be in hard-to-electrify sectors, like aviation, shipping and heavy industry, according to Fakhry.
With hydrogen, heavy-duty trucks that travel thousands of miles a day, for instance, won't need to carry heavy batteries and stop for long periods of time to recharge. The resource can also help integrate high percentages of renewables — excess solar and wind can be used to run electrolyzers, producing green hydrogen. And hydrogen can be stored underground fairly easily for months on end, meaning it can provide long-duration, seasonal storage.
But converting waste to hydrogen is a fairly new technology and could present some complexities, according to Fakhry — for instance, the process produces both carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide, and capturing and properly handling these is something to take into consideration.
"Another issue with biomass gasification is in the case of biomass in general, there's a lot of contention around is [it] really a renewable resource — what is the proper accounting for what is sustainable versus not sustainable? It's tricky to determine," she said.
|
.
Personally, I wonder how contained that tremendously high heat is, what kind of peripheral industrial development is likely to be involved, and what the hazards are. And how neighboring areas and beyond will be affected.
For example, how is this burn-process going to scrub and sequester dioxins out of the gasses/vapors or whatever output created by burning plastics?
The 2013 proposed plant for Kern County was going to be a pretty dirty, disruptive proposition. At only 7 years down the road, I wonder if Lancaster is in for an unpleasant awakening once the ink has dried on agreements and ground broken.
But at the moment, Lancaster looks mostly concerned about the same things as most of the rest of California, the nation, and the world — how to safely manage to reopen the economy all our lives most immediately depend upon. Other things that to some of us look and sound too good to be true —new environmental god-systems to worship, perhaps— have to take a back seat, attention-wise.
Or is it a back burner waiting to blow?
Thoughts & opinions, anyone?