Zero-emission blue hydrogen using chemical scrubbing-based CO2 capture

Kaiqi Jiang, Yong Cai and Kangkang Li

Energy, 2025, vol. 333, issue C

Abstract: Achieving global net zero emission necessitates the increasing demand of clean hydrogen for green energy and chemical synthesis. Blue hydrogen from coal gasification with CO2 capture and storage (CCS) enables a practical, cost-effective and scalable approach to decarbonize hydrogen industry with affordable cost. Scrubbing-based CO2 capture is a leading technology to deeply remove CO2 from various gas streams including coal gasification syngas. The present study explored the techno-economic assessment of an aqueous ammonia (NH3)-based CO2 capture process integrated with a coal gasification plant for producing zero-CO2-emission blue hydrogen. Owing to the chemical stability of NH3 at high pressure and temperature, the overall energy consumption of the NH3 process was prominently low at 0.134 MWh/tonne CO2 resulting from ultra-low regeneration duty of 1.2 GJ/tonne CO2 and negligible CO2 compression energy. This led to a competitive levelized cost of hydrogen (LCOH) of $5.3/kg H2 (based on 2022 US dollar). In addition, the proposed NH3 process ($48.2/tonne CO2) exhibited advantageous techno-economic performance compared with the commercial Selexol™ ($159.8/tonne CO2), Rectisol® ($93.9/tonne CO2) and MDEA technologies ($51.5/tonne CO2), indicating its cost competitiveness to achieve a zero-emission blue hydrogen. To our knowledge, this is the first time that zero-CO2-emission blue hydrogen synergised with advanced NH3 scrubbing technology has been presented and analysed in details.

Keywords: Blue hydrogen; Zero-CO2-emission; Coal gasification; Chemical scrubbing; NH3 solvent (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:energy:v:333:y:2025:i:c:s0360544225030774

DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2025.137435

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