Integrated Membrane Shift Reactor for Simultaneous CO2 Capture and Hydrogen Production
DOE Phase I Contract DE-FG02-05ER84199
Carbon dioxide (CO2) capture and storage is one of the solutions for reducing the global CO2 emission. The current challenges for CO2 capture are to reduce costs and to develop technologies that can be applied to the energy industry, which is one of the largest CO2 emission sources. Pre-combustion capture is an attractive technology that is currently under development to capture CO2 while converting fossil fuels to hydrogen or power. This program is directed towards developing an integrated membrane and water-gas-shift reactor system that can capture CO2 and produce hydrogen simultaneously at low-cost. The focuses of this program are to integrate Eltron’s proprietary hydrogen transport membrane with water-gas-shift catalyst, and demonstrate that high pressure CO2 and pure hydrogen can be obtained from the respective side of the membrane reactor. Successful completion of this Phase I program will result in tremendous cost-reduction in CO2 capture and hydrogen production.
This program aims at demonstrating that Eltron’s hydrogen transport membrane can be integrated with water-gas shift catalyst in a single reactor, from which high pressure CO2 ideal for sequestration, and pure hydrogen ideal for clean power generation will be produced separately. The key technical focus of this program is to evaluate and optimize such proposed integrated system for simultaneous CO2 capture and hydrogen production at low cost.
The dense hydrogen transport membrane developed at Eltron has shown superior hydrogen permeability and selectivity, and excellent chemical stability toward water gas shift gas mixture. This proposed Phase I project will focus on illustrating that Eltron’s membrane reactor and water-gas shift reactor can be combined into a single process that produces high pressure CO2 on one side and pure hydrogen on the other side of the system.
A major benefit of this proposed research is that the water-gas-shift/membrane reactor concept combines the water-gas shift reaction with the hydrogen/CO2 separation step, with major savings in energy and costs of CO2 capture. Ancillary benefits include: high purity hydrogen for fuel cell applications, very high CO2 capture efficiency (99+%), high pressure CO2 that significantly reduces the capital costs and energy penalty for CO2 compression, significant process simplification with lower capital expenditures for water gas-shift and CO2/hydrogen separation. Such system can be installed downstream to a variety of gasifiers for economical CO2 capture and hydrogen production.