Exelus Synthesis Gas Technology – ExSyte

Steam methane reforming (SMR) is the predominant commercial route for producing hydrogen. SMR is a capital-intensive process – capital charges represent 35-45% of product cost. Costs for producing hydrogen from commercial scale plants typically range from $0.65 - $0.70/kg. When this process is scaled down to 700-1500 kg/day for vehicle refueling applications, capital related charges become almost 90% of the total product costs ($4.50-$5.00/kg hydrogen). In order to achieve significant cost reductions, a meaningful shift in the underpinning reactor technology is required.

Exelus’ vision is to lower costs for hydrogen production by:

1. Simplifying reactor design by reducing thermodynamic barriers to the SMR reaction and
2. Completely eliminating need for hydrogen purification.

The Exelus approach is to use innovative chemistry to break down the thermodynamic barriers to the steam-reforming reaction to allow the reaction to occur under much milder conditions, without sacrificing the hydrogen content of natural gas. This approach greatly simplifies reactor design and reduces raw material consumption through lower temperature operation and the elimination of losses associated with a hydrogen purification unit. As a result, the new route achieves significant reductions in both capital costs and operating expenses. An important benefit of the reduced temperature operation is the ability to run the water gas shift reaction in the same reactor as the steam-reforming reaction. Finally, since innovative chemistry is used to reduce the thermodynamic barriers to the steam reforming reaction, many of the safety concerns of using membrane systems, that involve oxygen on one side of the membrane and hydrocarbons on the other, are avoided.