Europe – There are several sources to get hydrogen, including waste. Well-known in the southern part of the Netherlands is RWE’s Furec project at the Chemelot industrial park in Limburg. Some innovative projects in this field are also emerging in the UK. Promising because the cost per tonne of hydrogen produced soon seems to be relatively low.
RWE soon wants to convert waste into hydrogen and other chemical building blocks at Chemelot. As part of the Furec project, RWE plans to build a pre-treatment plant in nearby Zevenellen. Here, the group will soon convert non-recyclable municipal solid waste into solid recovered fuel pellets. The pellets will then be converted into hydrogen at a second RWE plant. The company will build this on the Chemelot industrial estate in Limburg. The plant is expected to produce 54,000 tonnes of hydrogen per year. Potential industrial buyers of the hydrogen are plentiful on the industrial park. Delivery to Rotterdam and the Ruhr region is also conceivable in the future. The COā‚‚ released during hydrogen production is captured and can be stored or used as a raw material by industry in the future.
According to RWE, this project would be the first in a series. Such facilities and infrastructure in other industrial clusters can also provide a huge, circular step. Last January, the European Union’s Innovation Fund awarded 108 million euros to the Furec project. RWE is expected to make the final investment decision this year.
United Kingdom
Several waste to hydrogen projects are also under way elsewhere. One interesting technology is that of British innovative company Advanced Plasma Power (APP). Its Gas Plasma process combines plasma gasification with a plasma conversion technology. This technology converts municipal solid waste and other types of waste into a syngas rich in hydrogen.
UK-based PowerHouse Energy has also made significant progress in using their Distributed Modular Gasification (DMG) technology to produce hydrogen via syngas from non-recyclable plastic waste. The first facility using this technology is under construction at the Protos site in the north-west of England.
PowerHouse Energy’s DMG technology can generate up to 2 tonnes of fuel-grade hydrogen or more than 58 MWh of exportable electricity per day.
Low price per tonne
Waste-to-hydrogen conversion technologies such as plasma gasification or gasification can have high initial investment costs. This is due to the complexity of the technology and the need for advanced purification and processing facilities. Large-scale approaches can, however, provide a relatively low price per tonne of hydrogen, depending on operational costs. These can vary, depending among other things on the availability and price of waste as feedstock.
