Process reconfiguration and intensification: An emerging opportunity enabling efficient carbon capture and low-cost blue hydrogen production

Low-carbon hydrogen can play a significant role in decarbonizing the world. Hydrogen is currently mainly produced from fossil sources, requiring additional CO2 capture to decarbonize, which energy intense and costly. In a recent Green Energy & Environment paper, Cheng and Di et al. proposed a novel integration process referred to as SECLRHC to generate high-purity H-2 by in-situ separation of H-2 and CO without using any additional separation unit. Theoretically, the proposed process can essentially achieve the separation of C and H in gaseous fuel via a reconfigured reaction process, and thus attaining high-purity hydrogen of similar to 99%, as well as good carbon and hydrogen utilization rates and economic feasibility. It displays an optimistic prospect that industrial decarbonization is not necessarily expensive, as long as a suitable CCS measure can be integrated into the industrial manufacturing process. (c) 2023 Institute of Process Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Publishing services by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of KeAi Communications Co., Ltd.