US-based petroleum company, ExxonMobil, has selected Technip Energies to do the front-end engineering and design (FEED) for its upcoming blue hydrogen plant at its site in Baytown, TX.

The hydrogen situation:

Pretty much all of the world's on-purpose hydrogen is made by steam reforming natural gas. That process absorbs heat, and operates most effectively at high temperatures, so some of that natural gas is burned to meet those heating requirements. But burning natural gas produces CO2, so we’ve been looking at more sustainable alternatives like: normal steam methane reforming but with carbon captured strapped on (blue hydrogen), methane pyrolysis (turquoise hydrogen), and water electrolysis (green hydrogen).

Bringing you up to speed:

In 2021, Exxon's PR team released a statement that basically (1) asked the US government for financial incentives to capture and store CO2, (2) proposed that Houston should build a $100 billion large-scale carbon capture hub, and (3) suggested to their Houston industry neighbors that they should also support (1) and (2). Later that year Exxon got some support from their industry neighbors, later announced plans for this blue hydrogen project, and now we're seeing them move that project forward (with a downsized version of the joint carbon capture hub mentioned in (2)).

Connecting the dots:

Exxon's plan is to start capturing the CO2 from its hydrogen production, and then to use that hydrogen to co-fire their steam cracker furnaces (normally those furnaces are fired solely with natural gas, so using some blue hydrogen effectively reduces their on-site emissions by 30%). Expect to see more blue hydrogen announcements in the near term, because traditional amine-based carbon capture is the fastest (and least technically risky) means of reducing the emissions from olefin production.

shipping vessels floating through the sky, with clouds

Japanese refiner, Eneos, finished building its demonstration-scale electrochemical methylcyclohexane (MCH) plant in Brisbane, Australia.

Some context:

While the sustainable hydrogen story is mostly about alternative production methods, it's partly a story about transportation. Gases are readily transported via pipeline, but when you can't build a pipeline (e.g. overseas), you need to get more creative. For natural gas, liquefaction prior to shipping overseas can make economic sense (that's LNG), but you can't say the same for liquefied hydrogen (it's more expensive, harder to liquefy, and less energy dense). So, our options are, 1) produce and consume it locally, or 2) get more creative.

What I mean by that:

Instead of trying to liquefy and transport hydrogen by itself, you could just use a liquid organic hydrogen carrier (LOHC)—which basically means strategically hydrogenating a chemical that is easier to ship, shipping that hydrogenated chemical, and then dehydrogenating it upon arrival. And that's what Eneos is looking to do with MCH, but instead of making MCH with a traditional chemical process, they figured out that adding toluene to the cathode side of a water electrolyzer also does the trick.

Bigger picture:

Eneos is basically telling us that the cost and availability of water and renewable electricity is significantly greater in Japan than it is in Australia. Otherwise, Eneos would just made green hydrogen via water electrolysis in Japan and done away with this plant construction and it's associated shipping costs.