A team of researchers from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc.) has developed an innovative technology to produce hydrogen from biomass, a renewable energy source.
India uses nearly 50 lakh tonnes of hydrogen for various processes in different sectors, and the hydrogen market is expected to grow substantially in the coming years, said S. Dasappa, Professor at the Centre for Sustainable Technologies and Chair of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Energy Research at IISc., who led the team.
“But most of the hydrogen we currently use comes from fossil fuels through a process called steam methane reforming route.”
The team has now found a way to extract green hydrogen from biomass. An IISc. release explained that the process consists of two steps.
Biomass is first converted into syngas – a hydrogen-rich fuel gas mixture – in a novel reactor using oxygen and steam. In the second step, pure hydrogen is generated from syngas using an indigenously developed low-pressure gas separation unit.
“Both these technologies ensure that this process is a highly efficient method of generating green hydrogen; it produces 100 g of hydrogen from 1 kg of biomass even though only 60 g of hydrogen are present in 1 kg of biomass. This is because in this process, steam, which also contains hydrogen, participates in both homogeneous and heterogeneous reactions,” explained the release.
The production of green hydrogen using this process is environmentally friendly for another reason: it is carbon negative. The two carbon-based by-products are solid carbon, which serves as a carbon sink, and carbon dioxide, which can be used in other value-added products, it added, also mentioning how the technology also dovetails with the National Hydrogen Energy Roadmap, an initiative of the Government of India that aims to promote the use of hydrogen as a fuel and reduce dependence on fossil fuels.
The project was supported by the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy and the Department of Science and Technology of the Government of India. The team also acknowledged the support of Indian Oil Corporation Limited in scaling up the technology to produce 0.25 tonnes of hydrogen per day for use in hydrogen-powered fuel cell buses.
