Modelled hydrogen process reaches 75% efficiency, 99% CO₂ capture

Hydrogen is meant to clean up the industries that cannot simply plug into the grid: heavy industry, chemicals, refining. The obstacle is that making low-carbon hydrogen efficiently and affordably remains hard. A team at The University of Manchester, working with industrial partners, now offers a new route on paper: a process that captures most of its own carbon dioxide as it produces hydrogen, and that was tested at two very different scales.

The method is called chemical looping reforming. Solid oxygen-carrier materials circulate oxygen through a sequence of reactions, and those reactions produce heat. That heat drives the transformation of methane and steam into syngas, a gas mixture containing hydrogen. Because the process inherently concentrates and separates CO₂ along the way, the carbon comes out already isolated, ready for storage or for use as a feedstock by other industries. The authors describe this as a route to what is called blue hydrogen, meaning hydrogen made from natural gas with the carbon dioxide captured and not released.

The researchers modelled two cases: a 2 MW plant for decentralised industrial sites, which could meet the electricity needs of about 5,000 average homes if running continuously, and a 600 MW facility suited to large industrial demand, which could supply about 1.5 million homes. In the most advanced designs, the modelled thermal efficiency reaches up to 75%, while capturing between 90% and 99% of carbon dioxide emissions. In several scenarios the system also produces excess steam that could be exported. Compared with steam methane reforming with carbon capture, autothermal reforming with carbon capture, and electrolyser-based production, the team found that for large-scale plants chemical looping could outperform conventional reforming on key efficiency measures while keeping capture rates very high.

For a refinery or an industrial cluster, the practical question is whether the process fits its site, its heat needs and its power supply. The authors are careful here: the best hydrogen solution, they write, will depend on local energy systems, infrastructure and policy. They see a possible role during the transition to lower-carbon energy, particularly where industrial heat can be integrated and low-carbon electricity remains limited. No start date or industrial deployment is given in the study.

What distinguishes this work is its realism. Earlier studies often examined idealised designs, whereas this one included reactor operation, valve performance, heat integration requirements and safety considerations. That makes the figures more useful for engineers, but they remain the output of modelling. Until a plant operates under these conditions, the 75% and 99% numbers describe what the design is expected to achieve.