Clean Energy Through a Clean Process; Hydrogen Production From Biogas

• Osama Almaskati
• Nova Korkees
• Trung Le
• Shirley Chan

We currently live in a world were fossil fuels are the most used energy resource and because of that there is a lot of carbon dioxide being emitted into the atmosphere. To combat this there has been a big push to find an alternative energy source that is clean and renewable. Many experts believe that hydrogen is going to be that fuel. The benefits of hydrogen is the fact that hydrogen fuel cells can be used to generate electricity and the only byproduct is water. Since hydrogen has so many other uses this allows the establishment of a self-sustaining hydrogen economy in which hydrogen is used to generate power and water and then that power is used to generate more hydrogen. The problem with the current way of producing hydrogen is the fact that they are not relatively clean process and they emit a lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. We believe that if the end goal of producing hydrogen is to limit the destruction that is being done to the environment then the way in which hydrogen is being produced should be clean too. Our process aims to fix that by producing hydrogen from biogas through the process of steam methane reforming (SMR) and then capturing the carbon dioxide produced and sequestering it. A typical SMR process uses natural gas as a feed stock, our process uses biogas which is produced from biomass which is either obtained from anaerobic digestion or from landfills. The benefits of using biogas comes from the fact that it itself is generated from a renewable source and that it is composed of some carbon dioxide that is captured and sequestered before sending it to the process. Overall our aim is to provide the world with a clean/renewable fuel through a clean/renewable process.