Achieving the European Green Deal target of becoming the world’s first climate-neutral continent by 2050 will require deep cuts to emissions across all aspects of the economy, including the power generation and heating sector. This, combined with the REPowerEU plans, places hydrogen as a clean energy carrier in a unique position. It can be used in, and thereby couple, all sectors like; power&heat, transport and industry. Hydrogen offers long term storage, it can be transported over large distances and it can be produced and used without, or with very low emissions. A central part of the EU climate strategies is the target of domestic renewable hydrogen production of 10 million tons by 2030, in addition to the same amount imported. This volume of hydrogen requires massive amount of geological storage as well as transportation by pipelines. Large scale use of hydrogen requires infrastructure for distribution to end users all over Europe.
Hydrogen storage in underground salt caverns structures is very limited, all of which three are in the USA and the one in the United Kingdom. Since the hydrogen mainly origins from steam methane reforming (SMR), the purity is around 95%. Rock caverns (sealed) are being developed, one of them within the HYBRIT project in Sweden, where clean hydrogen from electrolysis will be stored. In most geological storages and pipelines hydrogen will be already, or become, contaminated with substances not suitable for use in all types of fuel cells (like N2, CO, CO2, HC, sulphurs etc). Hydrogen produced via electrolysis is considered “clean”, the only impurities are oxygen and water. However, other sources of hydrogen, like from natural gas reforming, have impurities remaining from the production process.
While re-purification of this H2 can, and should be done for some applications by e.g. Pressure Swing Adsorption (PSA), it adds cost and complexity, and is not in all use cases economically feasible. Currently, there is no standard for the quality of H2 coming from geological storages or pipelines, and the knowledge about which contaminants are present in hydrogen from these storage sites is extremely limited.
Large-scale stationary fuel cells in the MW-range should be able to operate on such industrial quality H2 without repurification. They can offer a low-cost clean alternative for both large scale (peak) power and heat production, as well as for small, medium and large-scale back-up power units for the critical infrastructure, thereby also improving the resilience of the energy system. The H2 quality standard under development is expected to become around 98%, see table above, whereby the main relevant poisoning impurities are CO and sulphurs, in addition to inert gases like CO2 and N2, thus the fuel cell systems most tolerate these. With this background, the CLEANER consortium intends to develop a stationary 100 kW PEMFC module capable of operating on industrial quality hydrogen.
