SBIR Phase I: Hydrogen from Hydrogen Sulfide

这项小企业创新研究（SBIR）项目的广泛影响/商业潜力是推动一项技术，使能源部门许多不同领域的碳排放减少在经济上具有优势。富含硫的酸性气体通常是生物炼油厂、气体处理设施、石化和燃料炼油厂、垃圾填埋场、纸浆和造纸制造以及废物处理设施等环境中的副产品。该技术具有提供低成本、低碳氢产品的潜力。这些氢可以在当地用于取代目前基于化石燃料的氢原料，也可以作为额外的替代氢产品出售。这项技术有潜力使市场现有企业实现其积极的碳减排目标，并促进需要氢气作为化学原料或能源的新技术的发展。SBIR一期项目旨在优化一种基于新型硫碘循环的热化学制氢技术。降低氢气制造的碳强度，同时保持生产成本的商业相关性，尽管有很大的兴趣，但仍然难以实现。与以前的技术相比，拟议的项目提出了一种新的工艺，它显著降低了能源需求，改善了热集成，并且更容易分离工艺流。它还利用低价值的废物流作为主要原料。技术任务包括通过改变喷嘴配置、填料材料和反应器几何形状来优化气液接触器的传质质量，在示范和商业规模上准备一个非常详细的过程和技术经济模型，以及设计一个用于酸性伴生气井现场的试点示范装置。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project is advancing a technology that allows the economically advantageous reduction of carbon emissions in many different fields of the energy sector. Sour sulfur-rich gases are often a byproduct in settings including biorefineries, gas processing facilities, petrochemical and fuel refineries, landfills, pulp and paper manufacturing, and waste processing facilities. The proposed technology has potential to provide a low cost and low carbon hydrogen product. This hydrogen can be used locally to displace current fossil fuel-based hydrogen feedstocks or sold as an additional alternative hydrogen product. The technology has potential to both enable market incumbents to meet their aggressive carbon emission reduction goals and facilitate new technologies that require hydrogen as either a chemical feedstock or as an energy source. This SBIR Phase I project proposes to optimize a thermochemical hydrogen production technology based on a novel sulfur-iodine cycle. Reducing the carbon intensity of hydrogen manufacturing while keeping production costs commercially relevant has remained elusive despite significant interest. The proposed project advances a new process with significant reductions in energy requirements, improvements in heat integration, and more facile process stream separations compared to predecessor technologies. It also utilizes a low value waste stream as the principal feedstock. Technical tasks include optimizing the mass transfer qualities of the gas-liquid contactor by varying nozzle configuration, packing material, and reactor geometry, preparing a highly detailed process and techno-economic model at both the demonstration and commercial scale, and the design of a pilot demonstration unit for use at a sour associated gas well-site.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.