![]() “We’re making a product that already exists, is difficult to decarbonise, is made conventionally with a lot of CO 2 emissions, and we’re doing it in a fundamentally zero-CO 2 way. Iberdrola and Cummins announce plans for Europe's fourth hydrogen electrolyser gigafactory “We see ourselves as a sort of more broad-scale sustainability purveyor. “Really we see ourselves as a company that doesn't just make hydrogen or a company that makes carbon black.” Says Skoptsov, a former robotics engineer who founded H Quest in 2014. So you reduce your hydrogen output, but then you can go to make ethylene, for example.”Įthylene (C 2H 4), the key ingredient in the polyethylene plastic, is the world’s most produced organic compound, and mainly derived by heating natural gas or petroleum - processes that are said to account for about 0.8% of global greenhouse gas emissions. “But you can also freeze it at the chemical stage before it goes all the way to carbon. “If you are very skilled, you can take that process to graphene, it’s actually doing to form a large graphene sheet.” So it starts making chemicals, more complex chemical compounds, which sort of keep assembling themselves into larger and larger structures. What it does is it starts combining with itself - and through that process it loses hydrogen. “After you activate methane, it doesn’t simply start losing hydrogen, leaving carbon behind. There are many forms - or allotropes - of pure carbon that differ according to how the atoms are arranged, including diamonds carbon black, which is used in the production of tyres, printer inks and reinforced plastics and batteries graphite, used in pencils one-atom-thick graphenesheets and carbon nanotubes, the strongest material yet discovered.Īccording to information seen by Recharge, low-quality graphite costs about $5/kg, graphene comes in at roughly $175 per kilo, while carbon nanotubes can fetch up to $2,300/kg.īut Skoptsov says the “real advantage” of the company’s technology “has to do with the complexity of the pyrolysis process, which most people don’t recognise”. ![]() Upstream emissions risk 'killing the concept of blue hydrogen', says Equinor vice-president Heating natural gas in the absence of air, mainly inside so-called pyrolysis ovens, has long been discussed, with any H 2 produced in this way being labelled as “turquoise hydrogen”. This is because the carbon molecules combine with oxygen in the air, but take air out of the equation, and methane will split into hydrogen and solid carbon. Natural gas is used to produce most of the hydrogen currently used around the world today in the fertiliser, oil refining and chemicals sectors, but the steam methane reforming process used produces nine to 12 tonnes of CO 2 per tonne of H 2. “Thanks to the high value of the carbon co-product, under the currently prevailing natural gas and electricity prices, H Quest could essentially give the hydrogen away for free, and still make a profit,” chief executive George Skoptsov tells Recharge. The microwave plasma pyrolysis technology developed by Pittsburgh-based H Quest uses electricity to generate microwaves that moves methane (CH 4) into a plasma state, stripping off hydrogen atoms and initiating a chain reaction that creates solid carbon or petrochemical compounds such as acetylene (C 2H 2) and ethylene (C 2H 4). ‘Our unique AEM electrolysers will produce cheaper green hydrogen than any rival tech’
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