Techno-economic assessment of membrane-assisted gas switching reforming for pure H₂ production with CO₂ capture

Hydrogen has significant potential as a future carbon-free energy carrier. Given that the vast majority of the current global hydrogen is produced from fossil fuels, CO2 capture and storage (CCS) emerges as a promising strategy for delivering clean hydrogen on a global scale. The primary challenge with CCS is the large energy penalty imposed, but this problem is circumvented by the membrane-assisted gas switching reforming (MA-GSR) technology evaluated in this work. Combined reactor and process simulations showed that the MA-GSR process achieves a similar equivalent H2 production efficiency as conventional steam methane reforming without CO2 capture. The results of the process simulations also show that the new MA-GSR concept can achieve a higher H2 production efficiency than the conventional plant when integrated with CO2 capture (20% higher). However, a drawback of the MA-GSR concept is the low utilization of the membranes in the system, requiring a large membrane surface area for a given rate of hydrogen production. This makes the economics of the concept highly sensitive to the cost and durability of the H2 perm-selective membranes. In the base-case, the cost of hydrogen (0.274 €/Nm3 H2) was lower than the conventional process with CO2 capture (0.282 €/Nm3 H2), with a cost of CO2 avoidance of 85.14 €/tCO2 instead of 97.06 €/tCO2 for the conventional technology. Future technology improvements leading to a threefold reduction in the cost/permeability ratio of H2 perm-selective membranes can allow the MA-GSR technology to produce hydrogen at a similar cost as conventional steam methane reforming without CO2 capture.