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Chinese Academy of Sciences achieves breakthrough in blue hydrogen technology Author/Source: Modern coal chemical industry date: 2023-03-16 Click rate: 18 Recently, the Institute of Engineering Thermophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences achieved for the first time a breakthrough in the principle of "net-zero emission" hydrogen production from natural gas under mild conditions of 400°C. Through the orderly separation of hydrogen and CO2 products, the reaction temperature of natural gas hydrogen production is reduced from the traditional 800-1000°C to below 400°C, achieving the direct conversion of more than 99% of methane into high-purity hydrogen and high-purity CO2, and achieving complete synergy between hydrogen production and decarbonization based on fossil energy. Energy consumption for hydrogen production and decarbonization has been reduced by 20-40%. Based on this, this work combines commercial medium-temperature trough concentrator technology to achieve solar-driven hydrogen production and decarbonization from natural gas, further reducing the carbon footprint of hydrogen production from fossil energy, and demonstrating the feasibility of complementing fossil energy and renewable energy to achieve sustainable hydrogen energy utilization. The reduction in reaction temperature makes it possible to combine industrial waste heat with hydrogen energy. So far, researchers have completed more than 6,000 stable cycle experiments, verifying the reliability of the method and initially demonstrating the broad prospects for technology transformation and application. This work was completed by the team of Jin Hongguang, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a researcher at the Institute of Engineering Thermophysics, and was awarded * * Supported by the Natural Science Foundation's "Orderly Transformation of Energy" Basic Science Center Project. Focusing on the main line of the Science Center project, scientific researchers have creatively proposed a new thermodynamics idea of "ordered separation of thermochemical multi-products coupled with low-temperature thermal energy grade improvement" and have achieved a series of important breakthroughs in reducing reaction temperature, improving methane conversion rate and selectivity, capturing carbon dioxide with low energy consumption, and miniaturizing equipment. Relevant research results were published in Energy & Environmental Science. Hao Yong, a researcher at the Institute of Engineering Thermophysics, said that the combination of natural gas and solar energy to produce "net-zero emission" hydrogen energy demonstrates a new low-carbon utilization model of fossil energy that conforms to the characteristics of my country's energy structure under the new situation of vigorous development of low-carbon and renewable energy technologies. It is of great significance for low-carbon power generation, industrial waste heat utilization, and the consumption of renewable energy sources such as solar energy, wind energy, and biomass methane. Based on this result, it is studied that the resulting low-carbon hydrogen can be blended with natural gas to effectively improve the power generation efficiency of thermal power plants and reduce carbon emissions. ； Using natural gas as a hydrogen energy carrier to achieve on-demand hydrogen production in hydrogenation stations is expected to reduce infrastructure investment and hydrogen energy production, storage, and transportation costs, and achieve centralized resource utilization of CO2. In addition, this achievement can realize high-value, low-carbon utilization of industrial waste heat below 500°C. This research is expected to promote the decarbonization of the energy structure, increase the proportion of renewable energy, and accelerate the development of renewable energy technology. It will also provide new ideas for solving bottlenecks in the entire chain of hydrogen energy production, storage, and transportation. Currently, the team is working hard to promote the industrialization of this achievement, and a prototype prototype capable of producing 100 kilograms of hydrogen per day is under development.