Techno-economic analysis of on-site blue hydrogen production based on vacuum pressure adsorption: Practical application to real-world hydrogen refueling stations

Although climate change can be efficiently curbed by shifting to low-carbon (blue) hydrogen as an energy carrier to achieve carbon neutrality, current hydrogen production mainly proceeds via the gray pathway, i.e., generates large amounts of CO2 as a byproduct. To address the need for cleaner hydrogen production, we herein propose novel CO2 capture processes based on the integration of vacuum pressure swing adsorption into a gray hydrogen production process and perform retrofitting to a blue hydrogen production process for on-site hydrogen refueling stations. Techno-economic analysis reveals that the implementation of the proposed capture processes allows one to significantly reduce CO2 emission while preserving thermal efficiency, and the economic feasibility of this implementation in different scenarios is determined by computing the levelized cost of hydrogen. As a result, blue hydrogen is shown to hold great promise for the realization of sustainable energy usage and the net-zero transition.