Me²H2-Methane pyrolysis

State of the Art

• Hydrogen has a steadily growing importance as an industrial feedstock in many industrial processes, as a flexible energy sources or in the field of mobility
• Currently hydrogen is produced predominantly in industrially established processes that use fossil fuels and generate CO2 in proportion to the quantities of hydrogen produced
• New low carbon technologies for hydrogen production, e.g. the water electrolysis, are still in the development stage and yield a high specific energy consumption
• Due to the significant rise in demand for electricity in the future, economically viable, CO2-neutral hydrogen production must, above all, be energy-efficient

Project agenda

• Comparative technical and economic evaluation of possible process variants for methane pyrolysis with other industrial processes of hydrogen production
• Characterization of carbon from methane pyrolysis and specification of quality criteria for the exploitation in steel industry applications
• Investigation of the mechanical processing and thermal utilization of the solid pyrolysis carbon to set the required quality criteria
• Supply and evaluation of carbonaceous sample batches for selected applications
• Establish an evaluation matrix as a basis for selecting possible applications for the carbon products

Desired results

• Development of an industrial process to produce H2 by natural gas pyrolysis
• Development of a plant concept that enables CO2-neutral hydrogen production
• Development of quality requirements for the recovery of pyrolytic carbonaceous materials in steel industry processes
• Establishment of a recovery concept for the resulting carbon

• CO2-mitigation
• Hydrogen production
• pyrolysis