Hydrogen & Carbon Production
Synergen Met uses its proprietary plasma technology to efficiently produce clean hydrogen and solid carbon outputs via methane pyrolysis.
Synergen Met’s pyrolysis technology has been carefully developed over many years, since 2009. There are many benefits of using methane pyrolysis to create clean hydrogen:
Methane pyrolysis is driven by Synergen Met’s modular plasma heating systems that provide very high energy density. Molecular ionisation plus very high temperatures split methane into carbon and hydrogen.
The final products are hydrogen and carbon black, both of which are valuable commodities.
Synergen Met’s technology can be powered from both renewable and non-renewable energy sources.
Our technology is based on a modular, transportable, rapidly scalable platform. To date, we’ve completed pilot and small-scale commercial sized operations making hydrogen, acetylene and other chemicals.
Hydrogen & Solid Carbon Markets
Hydrogen Production
Hydrogen is looked upon as the next major energy source to fuel economic development in the automobile and energy sector. Hydrogen has a large corporate, industrial and research presence due to its ability to generate thermal energy (via combustion), electrical energy (via fuel cells) and as a reducing agent for bulk chemical production (e.g., ammonia, polymers, etc) without end-user carbon emissions.
Used as vehicle fuel, hydrogen has high purity requirements (mainly due to fuel cell technology) and as an energy carrier, hydrogen has the highest energy value per kg and lowest energy value per volume (at atmospheric conditions). It can be easily piped, but to be transported long distance, it needs to be compressed (to >200 bar), or liquefied.
Solid Carbon Production
Carbon as carbon black and graphite have well-established markets. Carbon black is used as a tyre input (wear resistance and pigment), while graphite is the single largest input to lithium (and many other) batteries. Carbon black has a world market price on the order of US$300-$1,500/tonne, while graphite varies from AUD$1,000/tonne when naturally occurring to AUD$20,000/tonne for high purity synthetic graphite (Hansen, 2015).
Battery manufacturing is progressively shifting towards use of synthetic graphite, mainly due to contamination of natural graphite and 95% of battery production now uses synthetic graphite (Hansen, 2015). Both the graphite and hydrogen markets are growing and the potential for value growth in graphite in particular is high due to the increasing need for high purity graphite in battery production.
Comparison between electrolysis and clean hydrogen produced via methane pyrolysis
Although hydrogen is by far the most common element on earth, there is essentially no natural free hydrogen gas, so to get hydrogen gas it must be extracted from other molecules which contain it.
There are three primary reservoirs of hydrogen on earth: water, hydrocarbons (oil and gas resources) and carbohydrates (plants). The most widely proposed clean source of “green” hydrogen is to recover hydrogen from water using renewable-power and electrolysis.
Other than water, many molecules in natural abundance contain hydrogen and could be applied for recovering hydrogen gas. Amongst these, the molecule with the most hydrogen per unit mass is methane - more than double that of water. As a source of hydrogen, methane has many compelling advantages.
The formation of water by burning hydrogen in oxygen releases 143 MJ/kg hydrogen which then also represents the minimum energy that is necessary to break the water apart again into hydrogen in oxygen. Comparably, the minimum energetic cost of cracking methane into hydrogen and carbon is only 19 MJ/kg of hydrogen, far lower than that of water splitting. Practical systems need more than the theoretical minimum energy since they are not 100% efficient, and some of the energy put in is lost (to heat, friction, noise etc).
For an industrial process, water electrolysis has about 85% efficiency (i.e. 85% of the energy put in as electricity is recovered as hydrogen, and only 15% is lost). Consequently, the ‘real’ energy cost in an industrial system for electrolytically splitting water is about 170MJ/kg of hydrogen produced.
By comparison, methane splitting occurs at high temperatures. The theoretical Specific Energy Consumption (SEC) for hydrogen production via thermal plasma is around 0.933 kWhr/N cubic metres hydrogen, which equates to 37.5MJ/kg hydrogen produced.
In practice, splitting methane can be done with around 75% less electrical energy input than splitting water, for an equivalent hydrogen production system. This process may also assist in the conservation of water supplies, as a result.