H2Tech Solutions kicked off its two-day technical session series on May 18 with an engaging presentation from Shell's Nan Liu, Licensing Technology Manager, Gasification and Blue Hydrogen.

Discussing the energy transition-related challenges presented to industry today, Liu touted hydrogen as the solution to overcome these challenges and accelerate the transition toward carbon neutrality. She also discussed how Shell's Blue Hydrogen Process can spearhead this transition.

Liu cited "Sky," Shell's most optimistic scenario in terms of global climate change outcomes, to emphasize the potential of hydrogen in decarbonizing sectors such as power generation, heavy-duty transport and industrial hydrogen use.

The large hydrogen demand stemming from these potential applications can be produced via several routes. The primary difference between available technology lineups for blue hydrogen is in the syngas generation technology. Liu presented a comparative analysis to show the significant advantages of Shell Gas POX (SGP) technology over steam methane reforming (SMR) and autothermal reforming (ATR).

SGP is an oxygen-based precombustion process and, unlike SMR, allows for more cost-effective carbon capture. ATR is also oxygen-based, but SGP offers additional advantages over ATR such as no feed preheating requirement, a non-catalytic process, no steam input requirement, and most importantly smaller equipment size due to high-pressure operation, which saves power for the compression of hydrogen and CO2 products. The overall lower OPEX and nearly 35% less power input based on 500 tpd of hydrogen make SGP the best option for greenfield hydrogen production, Liu said.

The Shell Blue Hydrogen process for hydrogen production from natural gas uses the Shell proprietary SGP and ADIP ULTRA technologies integrated embedded H2 purification and carbon capture and storage processes.

The Shell Blue Hydrogen process is also highly cost-effective compared to SMR and ATR. It offers a lower levelized cost of hydrogen and a lower CAPEX and OPEX compared to ATR. SGP does require 6% more

natural gas feed due to higher reaction temperature. However, the reaction heat is recovered in steam generation, and the additional cost of the feed is offset by the additional steam available for power generation.

The Shell Blue Hydrogen process is also highly robust against feed contaminants such as sulfur, olefins, C2+, etc. Further integration of Shell technologies provides additional advantages to the process. Use of intermediate flash allows for nearly 50% CO2 regenerated at medium pressure, thereby reducing overall compressor duty and cost.

Furthermore, the integration of a methanation unit eliminates direct CO2 emission and provides sufficient-purity H2 for synthesis applications. Additionally, the high-pressure operation of the Shell Blue Hydrogen process allows it to be easily integrated with blue ammonia synthesis.

Shell is offering an integrated blue hydrogen/blue ammonia scheme to the market. The most significant advantage of the process is the > 99% CO2 capture rate, which allows for a higher carbon credit without additional cost.