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PES2020-Prosj.etabl.støtte H2020

Decentralised Production of Hydrogen from Urea

Tildelt: kr 79 999

The expression Hydrogen Economy refers to the policy of implementing hydrogen as a low carbon energy source to replace the combustion of gasoline in vehicles and as a replacement for fossil fuels for heating. The appeal of using hydrogen in this way is that whether it is burned to produce heat or reacted with air in a fuel cell to directly produce electricity, the only by-product is water vapour. Hydrogen can also be used to store renewable energy from intermittent sources such as wind turbines and thus act as an alternative to impractical and costly storage systems which currently attach a large cost overhead to these methods of power generation. Hydrogen could also be blended with natural gas for urban and industrial heating and is used extensively in the chemical industry for many processes and thus methods of its handling and distribution on a large scale are well known and understood. All of these factors are significant considerations for employing hydrogen in low-cost low-carbon systems. However, free hydrogen does not exist in natural reservoirs on earth and almost all of the supply of global hydrogen is produced directly from fossil fuels. Natural gas accounts for the largest fraction of this (48%) followed by oil (30%) and coal (18%) with the production of hydrogen via the electrolysis of water, accounting for a mere 4%. The reason for this imbalance and the continuing heavy reliance on fossil fuels is that the production of hydrogen by electrolysis of water requires 50 kWh per kilogram of hydrogen produced and is at least 3 times more expensive than the steam reformation of the hydrocarbons found in fossil fuels. The fact that it takes energy to produce hydrogen (from whatever source) actually makes hydrogen an energy carrier or storage medium, rather than an actual energy source in itself. This proposal explores the production of hydrogen from urea as an alternative method of mass production.

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PES2020-Prosj.etabl.støtte H2020