€9.2m project to develop sustainable syngas
2 Jul 2013
Process for industrial-scale reaction of carbon dioxide with hydrogen claims to reduce CO2 emissions.
BASF, the Linde Group and ThyssenKrupp plan to develop an environmentally friendly and competitive process for using carbon dioxide on an industrial scale.
Together with BASF’s subsidiary hte AG and scientific partners VDEh-Betriebsforschungsinstitut, Düsseldorf, and TU Dortmund University, the companies are developing a two-stage process.
In the first step, a high-temperature technology will process natural gas to obtain hydrogen and carbon. Compared to other processes, this technology produces very little CO2.
We expect CO2 emissions to be about 50% lower than in current standard processes
The hydrogen is then reacted with large volumes of CO2, also from other industrial processes, to give syngas.
A mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen, syngas is a key raw material for the chemical industry and is also suitable for producing fuels.
“In hydrogen production alone, we expect CO2 emissions to be about 50% lower than in current standard processes. At the same time, this process produces hydrogen at particularly competitive costs,” said Dr. Peter Schuhmacher, President, BASF SE Process Research & Chemical Engineering.
The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) is subsidising the project within its “Technologies for Sustainability and Climate Protection - Chemical Processes and Use of CO2” scheme.
It has provided a grant of €9.2m to support intersectoral cooperation between industry and academia for three years.
According to BASF, the project’s approach has several advantages:
- Natural gas is a plentiful resource with a more favourable content of hydrogen and carbon than biomass, for example.
- Natural gas decomposition is achieved thermally only, without any addition of oxygen or water.
- This enables the production of hydrogen and solid carbon; the latter may potentially be used to replace hard coal in the coke and steel industries.
- In an additional innovative catalytic process step, carbon dioxide is combined with the hydrogen obtained from natural gas decomposition to produce syngas.
- With the process operating at very high temperatures, the innovative reactor design ensures that the correspondingly large amounts of waste heat are recycled immediately into the process.
- The technology is suitable for industrial production.
