Techno-economic assessment of pressure swing adsorption tail gas decarbonisation for blue hydrogen production

Ayub Golmakani; Navid Khallaghi; Amirpiran Amiri; Vasilije Manovic; Seyed Ali Nabavi

doi:10.1016/j.jgsce.2025.205683

Techno-economic assessment of pressure swing adsorption tail gas decarbonisation for blue hydrogen production

Ayub Golmakani, Navid Khallaghi^*, Amirpiran Amiri, Vasilije Manovic, Seyed Ali Nabavi

^*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Abstract

Steam methane reforming (SMR) is a leading technology for hydrogen production. However, this technology is still carbon-intensive since, in current SMR units, the PSA tail gas containing H2, CO, and CH4 is burned at the reformer with air and exits the stack at a CO2 purity of less than 5%, which is not feasible to capture. In this paper, we aim to either harness the energy content of this gas to generate power in a solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) or burn it via chemical looping combustion (CLC) or oxy-combustion process to produce off-gas with high CO2 purity ready to storage. Therefore, an industrial-scale PSA with 72,000 Nm3/h feed capacity was modelled to obtain the tail gas flow rate and composition. Then, CLC, SOFC, and oxy-combustion were modelled to use tail gas. Finally, a techno-economic analysis was conducted to calculate each technology's levelised cost of hydrogen (LCOH). It was observed that CO2 purity for CLC meets the criteria for storage (>95%) without further purification. On the other hand, from the economic point of view, all three technologies show a promising performance with an LCOH of 1.9 €/kg.

Original language	English
Article number	205683
Number of pages	11
Journal	Gas Science and Engineering
Volume	142
Early online date	10 Jun 2025
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jgsce.2025.205683
Publication status	E-pub ahead of print - 10 Jun 2025

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Techno-economic assessment of pressure swing adsorption tail gas
Copyright © 2025 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ ).
Final published version, 4.51 MBLicence: CC BY 4.0

Cite this

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title = "Techno-economic assessment of pressure swing adsorption tail gas decarbonisation for blue hydrogen production",

abstract = "Steam methane reforming (SMR) is a leading technology for hydrogen production. However, this technology is still carbon-intensive since, in current SMR units, the PSA tail gas containing H2, CO, and CH4 is burned at the reformer with air and exits the stack at a CO2 purity of less than 5%, which is not feasible to capture. In this paper, we aim to either harness the energy content of this gas to generate power in a solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) or burn it via chemical looping combustion (CLC) or oxy-combustion process to produce off-gas with high CO2 purity ready to storage. Therefore, an industrial-scale PSA with 72,000 Nm3/h feed capacity was modelled to obtain the tail gas flow rate and composition. Then, CLC, SOFC, and oxy-combustion were modelled to use tail gas. Finally, a techno-economic analysis was conducted to calculate each technology's levelised cost of hydrogen (LCOH). It was observed that CO2 purity for CLC meets the criteria for storage (>95%) without further purification. On the other hand, from the economic point of view, all three technologies show a promising performance with an LCOH of 1.9 €/kg.",

author = "Ayub Golmakani and Navid Khallaghi and Amirpiran Amiri and Vasilije Manovic and Nabavi, {Seyed Ali}",

note = "Copyright {\textcopyright} 2025 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ ). ",

year = "2025",

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T1 - Techno-economic assessment of pressure swing adsorption tail gas decarbonisation for blue hydrogen production

AU - Golmakani, Ayub

AU - Khallaghi, Navid

AU - Amiri, Amirpiran

AU - Manovic, Vasilije

AU - Nabavi, Seyed Ali

PY - 2025/6/10

Y1 - 2025/6/10

N2 - Steam methane reforming (SMR) is a leading technology for hydrogen production. However, this technology is still carbon-intensive since, in current SMR units, the PSA tail gas containing H2, CO, and CH4 is burned at the reformer with air and exits the stack at a CO2 purity of less than 5%, which is not feasible to capture. In this paper, we aim to either harness the energy content of this gas to generate power in a solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) or burn it via chemical looping combustion (CLC) or oxy-combustion process to produce off-gas with high CO2 purity ready to storage. Therefore, an industrial-scale PSA with 72,000 Nm3/h feed capacity was modelled to obtain the tail gas flow rate and composition. Then, CLC, SOFC, and oxy-combustion were modelled to use tail gas. Finally, a techno-economic analysis was conducted to calculate each technology's levelised cost of hydrogen (LCOH). It was observed that CO2 purity for CLC meets the criteria for storage (>95%) without further purification. On the other hand, from the economic point of view, all three technologies show a promising performance with an LCOH of 1.9 €/kg.

AB - Steam methane reforming (SMR) is a leading technology for hydrogen production. However, this technology is still carbon-intensive since, in current SMR units, the PSA tail gas containing H2, CO, and CH4 is burned at the reformer with air and exits the stack at a CO2 purity of less than 5%, which is not feasible to capture. In this paper, we aim to either harness the energy content of this gas to generate power in a solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) or burn it via chemical looping combustion (CLC) or oxy-combustion process to produce off-gas with high CO2 purity ready to storage. Therefore, an industrial-scale PSA with 72,000 Nm3/h feed capacity was modelled to obtain the tail gas flow rate and composition. Then, CLC, SOFC, and oxy-combustion were modelled to use tail gas. Finally, a techno-economic analysis was conducted to calculate each technology's levelised cost of hydrogen (LCOH). It was observed that CO2 purity for CLC meets the criteria for storage (>95%) without further purification. On the other hand, from the economic point of view, all three technologies show a promising performance with an LCOH of 1.9 €/kg.

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DO - 10.1016/j.jgsce.2025.205683

M3 - Article

SN - 2949-9089

VL - 142

JO - Gas Science and Engineering

JF - Gas Science and Engineering

M1 - 205683

ER -

Techno-economic assessment of pressure swing adsorption tail gas decarbonisation for blue hydrogen production

Abstract

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