The US Department of Energy (DOE) awarded nearly $34 million to 19 industry- and university-led research projects that will advance technology solutions to make clean hydrogen a more available and affordable fuel for electricity generation, industrial decarbonization, and transportation.

The projects are additional selections for the $160-million funding opportunity DE-FOA-0002400, announced in January 2021. (Earlier post.)

DOE’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL), under the purview of DOE’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management (FECM), will manage the selected projects. Projects will focus on:

• Developing technologies that could help produce clean hydrogen at lower cost and with less energy;

• Exploring ways to produce hydrogen using biomass, effluent waters from oil and natural gas development and production, and other wastes; and

• Expanding options for safe and efficient hydrogen transport and storage across the nation.

The additional selections for funding opportunity announcement 2400: Clean Hydrogen Production, Storage, Transport and Utilization to Enable a Net-Zero Carbon Economy (Round 3) include:

Area Of Interest 4 — Advanced Air Separation For Low-Cost H₂ Production Via Modular Gasification

An Advanced Modular Redox Air Separation System for Cost-Effective, Net-Zero Hydrogen Production — North Carolina State University intends to develop a redox-based, radically engineered modular air separation unit (REM-ASU) with significant reductions in capital cost and energy consumption for oxygen generation when compared to state-of-the-art air separation technologies. The team proposes to: (1) develop advanced steam-resistant oxygen sorbents with greater than 2 wt.% oxygen capacity and high activity for efficient oxygen generation without a vacuum desorption step; (2) demonstrate the REM-ASU system in a 20 kilogram per day testbed to validate the sorbent robustness and process performance; and (3) design the REM-ASU for integration with a 5-10 megawatt modular biomass gasifier with greater than 35% energy and cost reduction for greater than 98% oxygen generation compared to conventional ASUs.

DOE Funding: $1,249,960; Non-DOE Funding: $313,051; Total Value: $1,563,011

Optimization and Scale-up of Molecular-Sieve Membranes with Record Air Separation Performance — Osmoses Inc. plans to develop a novel membrane system from Osmoses’ proprietary polymer composition that can produce enriched oxygen from air for integration into modular gasification systems for low-cost hydrogen production. In addition to helping the nation meet ambitious carbon-neutral goals, the development and implementation of the proposed technology can help reduce the cost of and emissions from hydrogen production to mitigate the effects of climate change while creating new jobs and revitalizing our economy.

DOE Funding: $1,249,997; Non-DOE Funding: $312,516; Total Value: $1,562,513

Oxygen Integrated Unit for Modular Biomass Conversion to Hydrogen — Palo Alto Research Center Inc., in collaboration with SIMACRO and PCI Gases, intends to develop a fast and high-capacity reversible oxygen sorbent that enables an Oxygen Integrated Unit for Modular Biomass Conversion to Hydrogen. If successful, this project will demonstrate the potential for a small-scale, modular ASU to produce clean, carbon-free energy from local biomass, providing communities with an alternative to trucks or pipelines transferring hydrogen. This success would also provide a route to fuel diversification and energy resiliency and bring the clean energy economy and jobs to rural and historically disadvantaged communities.

DOE Funding: $1,249,999; Non-DOE Funding: $312,500; Total Value: $1,562,499

Electrochemically Mediated Air Separation Modules — Raytheon Technologies Research Center, in collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California Irvine, and the University of California Davis, plans to research, develop, and demonstrate a cost-effective, energy-efficient, clean, and scalable process for separating oxygen from air that relies on soluble redox species to capture oxygen and release it into a greater than 99% pure oxygen stream. The project will define key performance metrics for candidate electrochemically activated oxygen capture molecules, computationally assess approximately 106 transition metals complexes against these metrics, provide fundamental experimental data on a subset of materials, generate proof-of-concept subscale reactor data on at least one material set, provide design concepts appropriate for scale-up, and perform techno-economic analyses to assess the status and potential of this technology compared to conventional approaches to air separation.

DOE Funding: $1,249,958; Non-DOE Funding: $312,490; Total Value: $1,562,448

Carbon Molecular Sieve Membranes with Hierarchical Chemistries and Structures for O₂/N₂ Separation — State University of New York on behalf of University at Buffalo intends to develop carbon molecular sieve hollow fiber composite membranes with hierarchical chemistries and structures for oxygen production from the air, enabling low-cost modular hydrogen production from biomasses or wastes. The team intends to address the requirement of advancing modular air separation to support modular gasification-based hydrogen production. If successfully developed, the technology would produce oxygen at a lower cost than cryogenic-based air separation at small scales and benefit small modular energy systems.

DOE Funding: $1,250,000; Non-DOE Funding: $500,000; Total Value: $1,750,000

High Purity Oxygen Generation through Modular Structured RPSA — Susteon Inc. plans to develop a process that produces high-purity oxygen from air at significantly lower cost than state-of-the-art commercial technologies. The proposed process technology can produce oxygen with purity greater than 95% and power consumption less than 230 kilowatt hours per ton of oxygen, using only 11.5 megawatt hours to form 50 metric tons of oxygen. The team plans to demonstrate continuous oxygen production at 10 kg per day; scale up fiber adsorbent materials for rapid pressure swing adsorption module fabrication; complete more than 100 hours of process cyclic testing, including mild pressured-adsorption followed by light vacuum-regeneration, to prove multicycle stability with low energy requirement. Additionally, the awardee intends to perform a high-fidelity techno-economic analysis and life-cycle analysis to develop a technology commercialization plan, which would involve obtaining an accurate price estimate for the high-purity oxygen for related biomass gasification.

DOE Funding: $1,250,000; Non-DOE Funding: $312,500; Total Value: $1,562,500

Advanced Air Separation Unit (ASU) for Low-Cost H₂ Production Via Modular Gasification — TDA Research Inc. intends to develop a modular, sorbent-based air separation unit (ASU) for oxygen production to support low-cost hydrogen production from gasification of biomass and/or wastes. The team intends to demonstrate high-purity (greater than 98% by volume, preferably above 99.5% by volume) oxygen generation from ambient air using a process that is more compact, more affordable, and more efficient than comparable cryogenic-based ASUs. The new oxygen production system will be sized to support 5-50 megawatt gasification systems (30-300 tonne per day of oxygen flow) for zero-carbon hydrogen production — a scale where the modular sorbent-based system provides significant capital and operating cost reductions compared with commercial/conventional cryogenic distillation-based oxygen generation technologies.

DOE Funding: $1,250,000; Non-DOE Funding: $312,500; Total Value: $1,562,500

Area of Interest 14a — Methane Pyrolysis/Decomposition, In Situ Conversion, Or Cyclical Chemical Looping Reforming

Bench-Scale Testing and Development of Fixed Bed Chemical Looping Reactor for Hydrogen Generation from Natural Gas with CO₂ Capture — The Ohio State University, teaming with Babcock and Wilcox, plans to develop a fixed bed chemical looping process to produce hydrogen from natural gas with in-situ carbon dioxide capture using an iron-based mixed metal oxide composite (MMOC) with the overall goal to validate and scale up the MMOC-based fixed bed technology for hydrogen production and analyze its techno-economic impact. The fixed bed chemical looping system has been designed to operate in three reaction modes that can occur simultaneously for continuous hydrogen production: natural gas utilization through the reduction of MMOC, steam oxidation and air regeneration.

DOE Funding: $1,499,238; Non-DOE Funding: $375,000; Total Value: $1,874,238

Lower-Cost, CO₂-Free H₂ Production via CH₄ Pyrolysis in Molten Tin — Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers intend to employ a novel methane pyrolysis approach to produce low-cost hydrogen that does not producecarbon dioxide as a byproduct. The approach leverages a key technological innovation: the ability to pump and contain liquid metals such as liquid tin at temperatures greater than 1400 °C. Since tin is inert with respect to both carbon and hydrogen, it can be used as a heat transfer fluid in a high-temperature bubble column reactor that does not need a catalyst, since it can operate at high enough temperatures to ensure complete conversion (i.e., approximately 1400 °C). The liquid tin can be used to facilitate continuous removal of the solid carbon byproduct and can be used to facilitate an innovative heat recovery technique that renders the entire process energy efficient.

DOE Funding: $1,500,000; Non-DOE Funding: $375,048; Total Value: $1,875,048

Thermo-Catalytic Co-Production of Hydrogen and High-Value Carbon Products from Natural Gas Using Structured Materials — Susteon Inc., in collaboration with Stanford University and Rice University, intends to develop and demonstrate a novel thermocatalytic methane pyrolysis process that utilizes a structured catalyst to produce high-value carbon and hydrogen. The structured catalyst consists of a supported active metal and provides the ability to utilize low-carbon renewable electricity to supply the endothermic heat required for methane pyrolysis. Extensive experimental work has been performed to identify a catalyst composition and process design capable of achieving greater than 90% single pass conversion of methane into hydrogen at temperatures below 850 °C, which significantly lowers the downstream purification costs. The process simultaneously produces high-quality carbon, primarily carbon nanotubes, which sequesters the carbon as a solid, avoids gaseous emissions, and creates a high-value, salable product. The process enables efficient separation of solid carbon particles, which is a key challenge of methane pyrolysis, and can help significantly offset the cost of hydrogen production.

DOE Funding: $1,500,000; Non-DOE Funding: $375,000; Total Value: $1,875,000

Direct Solar Self-Catalyzing Pyrolysis of Natural Gas to Hydrogen and High-Quality Graphite — University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), in collaboration with the Southwest Solar Technology LLC and SolGrapH Inc., plans to advance a novel technology discovered by UCLA researchers that uses concentrated solar energy to convert methane into green hydrogen and a high-value form of solid carbon. In lieu of venting carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, the process transforms natural gas-derived carbon into stable graphitic carbon that can be used to produce batteries or other high-value end products. This first-of-its-kind process releases zero direct carbon dioxide emissions by capturing the carbon that is typically released and sequester it into a valuable commodity for use in the renewable energy ecosystem. The team will conduct a series of scale-up experiments to achieve high yields of hydrogen and graphitic carbon in a representative solar environment with 40–50 kilowatt insolation to produce greater than 5 kilograms of hydrogen per day. UCLA’s team will quantify the benefits and outcomes of these efforts through a combination of detailed instrumentation and internal as well as third-party verification.

DOE Funding: $1,461,772; Non-DOE Funding: $377,848; Total Value: $1,839,620

Area of Interest 14b — Hydrogen Production From Produced Water

HALO: Hydrogen-Recovery Using an AI-Arc-Plasma Learning Operational System for Produced Water — Oceanit Laboratories, Inc. plans to develop a modular, mobile hydrogen production system that uses plasma technology to provide the operational flexibility needed to dissociate toxic produced water into valuable end products. The HALO (Hydrogen-recovery using AI-arc-plasma Learning Operational) system provides a modular and scalable solution to achieve the simultaneous goals of fuel recovery and disposal of toxic wastewater from oil and natural gas production. Oceanit will also apply advanced artificial intelligence to optimize the hydrogen production process to increase efficiency and reduce operating costs by utilizing toxic wastewater as fuel to power HALO. For this project, a pilot-scale HALO system will be designed, fabricated, and integrated into an active wastewater treatment facility unit to measure its performance and identify other valuable end products.

DOE Funding: $5,000,000; Non-DOE Funding: $5,000,000; Total Value: $10,000,000

Integration of Produced Water Thermal Desalination and Steam Methane Reforming (SMR) for Efficient Hydrogen Production — University of Wyoming, with partners Los Alamos National Laboratory and Engineering, Procurement & Construction LLC, plan to demonstrate hydrogen production using water produced during oil and gas extraction by integrating supercritical water desalination and oxidation (SCWDO) with steam methane reforming (SMR). SCWDO uses heat to remove salts, metals and organic molecules from water and SMR then combines this pure water with methane to produce hydrogen. The team has previously shown that the heat intensive SCWDO process can be coupled to the front of an SMR process. Both SCWDO and SMR are hot processes, and the project will show how they can be integrated at large scale to conserve heat energy, enabling field demonstration of a 15% cost reduction over existing SMR technologies at approximately one ton of hydrogen per day.

DOE Funding: $4,997,749; Non-DOE Funding: $4,999,387; Total Value: $9,997,136

Area of Interest 15 — Technologies For Enabling The Safe And Efficient Transportation Of Hydrogen Within The US Natural Gas Pipeline System

Assessment of Toughness in H-Containing Blended Gas Environments in High Strength Pipeline Steels — Colorado School of Mines intends to determine the influence of microstructure on steel lined pipe mechanical property qualification metrics for blended gas environments containing hydrogen. The investigation will be performed on steels with a range of strength levels (e.g., X52 to X80 steels) to inform potential modification of these standards to incorporate use of higher strength grades at higher hydrogen pressures. If successful, this modification would enable significant cost savings and increase hydrogen carrying capacity while maintaining reliability. The project could also produce a ranked list of critical alloy and microstructure features that correlate to enhanced hydrogen embrittlement resistance in pipeline steels at strength levels up to those comparable to an X80 pipeline steel.

DOE Funding: $1,500,000; Non-DOE Funding: $375,000; Total Value: $1,875,000

Technologies for Enabling the Safe and Efficient Transportation of Hydrogen within the US Natural Gas Pipeline System — Southwest Research Institute, the 20 natural gas pipeline operating companies, and 50 engineering and equipment manufacturing companies that are members of the Gas Machinery Research Council (GMRC) plan to develop and demonstrate a full-scale compression system blending hydrogen and natural gas through modification and operation of an existing reciprocating compressor piping loop. This effort aims to advance multiple technologies enabling near-term, safe transportation of hydrogen within the U.S. natural gas pipeline system by adapting and operating the closed-loop compression facility with hydrogen-natural gas blends up to 20% hydrogen by volume. If successful, this project will enable safe and efficient compression of hydrogen-natural gas blends by de-risking the application and adaptation of these components for hydrogen blending through detailed evaluation, modification, commissioning, and operation at full-scale conditions, including the design, construction, and integration of a blending skid and testing of a hydrogen separation system for high value end uses.

DOE Funding: $1,500,000; Non-DOE Funding: $375,000; Total Value: $1,875,000

Area Of Interest 16 — Fundamental Research To Enable High Volume, Long-Term Subsurface Hydrogen Storage

Developing & Investigating Subsurface Storage Potential and Technical Challenges for Hydrogen — Institute of Gas Technology dba GTI Energy intends to determine the feasibility of using Oklahoma’s vast depleted oil and gas reservoirs to enable the transition to a carbon free energy infrastructure. A successful outcome of the project would provide: an affirmation of underground hydrogen storage feasibility in the depleted oil and gas reservoirs and potentially feasible volumes, timelines, and operational pathways; clarification of projects risks, mitigation/monitoring planning, hydrogen source and transport planning; analysis of contractual and regulatory requirements, technical and economic feasibility assessment, and field deployment planning; and an evaluation of commercial-scale storage feasibility in a geographic region and a geologic setting not previously achieved.

DOE Funding: $1,400,000; Non-DOE Funding: $350,000; Total Value: $1,750,000

Williston Basin Resource Study for Commercial-Scale Subsurface Hydrogen Storage — University of North Dakota Energy and Environmental Research Center plans to support the future commercialization of hydrogen generation, storage, and use by assessing the potential for high-volume, secure subsurface hydrogen storage with high recovery from geologic complexes of the North Dakota portion of the Williston Basin. The team plans to assess saline, depleted oil and gas, and salt formations for hydrogen storage suitability; characterize and assess the effects of long-term hydrogen storage use and exposure on formation fluids, storage and confining unit rocks, and wellbore materials; and conduct a basin-wide estimate of geologic hydrogen storage potential, including factors that will inform storage and recovery performance. This project will build upon proof-of-concept validation regarding fundamental research to determine the hydrogen storage resource potential of the Williston Basin’s geologic formations and progress through the proposed assessment to support potential field-scale development in subsequent research phases.

DOE Funding: $1,500,000; Non-DOE Funding: $375,000; Total Value: $1,875,000

Hydrogen Storage in Salt Caverns in the Permian Basin: Seal Integrity Evaluation and Field Test — University of Texas at Austin intends to determine the hydrogen sealing capacity of storage caverns in bedded salt within the Salado Formation in the Permian Basin, a major energy hub in the United States. The research project will investigate the physical properties of salt rocks in the presence of hydrogen, effects of long-term hydrogen exposure on rocks and cement, and the impact of coupled geochemically and microbially induced processes that might alter initial properties. The research approach combines advanced experimental techniques and numerical simulation for multiphase fluid flow and geomechanics from the pore to the core scale, geophysical methods for vertical heterogeneity characterization at the meso-scale, and validation through a full-scale test with a hydrogen injection borehole and monitoring wells in DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.

DOE Funding: $1,483,488; Non-DOE Funding: $370,873; Total Value: $1,854,361

Assessment of Subsurface Hydrogen Storage in Depleted Gas Fields of Appalachia — Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University plans to establish the subsurface hydrogen storage potential in the depleted gas fields of Appalachia, which include Berea, Big Lime, and fractured Marcellus. Subsurface hydrogen storage in depleted gas fields will provide large volumetric storage capacities for hydrogen, without the need for massive surface storage infrastructures. Such operations will allow clean energy to be made available, especially during periods of low-supply and high-demand.

DOE Funding: $1,499,999; Non-DOE Funding: $375,000; Total Value: $1,874,999

With the new selections, FECM has announced investments of more than $122 million in 72 projects since January 2021 to explore new, clean methods to produce hydrogen and to improve the performance of hydrogen-fueled turbines. These projects support DOE’s Hydrogen Shot initiative, which seeks to reduce the cost of clean hydrogen by 80% to $1 per 1 kilogram in one decade to grow new, clean hydrogen pathways in the United States.