What if we could bring together Oklahoma’s abundant natural resources, like methane, with Iowa’s renewable biomass to create a better way to produce hydrogen energy?
That question is the subject of a new study being explored by researchers at the University of Oklahoma and Iowa State University. The four-year project will also investigate the potential byproducts and related applications of solid carbon that might result from effectively generating carbon neutral or carbon negative hydrogen energy. The research is funded by an expected $4 million from the National Science Foundation and is led by Steven P. Crossley, the Sam A. Wilson Professor in the School of Chemical, Biological and Materials Engineering, Gallogly College of Engineering, and an energy research fellow at the OU Institute for Resilient Environmental and Energy Systems.
“There's a strong drive to create energy without creating the side effect of global warming, but we still have a need for cost-effective energy for our society,” Crossley said. “One of the really promising avenues is to convert the carbon that is in these forms of diverse natural resources into solid carbon and extract the hydrogen as our energy source.”
Creating a New Energy Economy
There has been a great deal of excitement in the climate science world around hydrogen-based energy as an alternative to directly combusting fossil fuel-based sources for energy. The goal of hydrogen energy research is to produce it cheaply, without greenhouse gas emissions and at scale from either water or hydrogen-rich organic compounds. However, there are several methods by which this conversion can take place which all come with their own benefits and costs.
Hydrogen production by pyrolysis – breaking apart natural gas into hydrogen and solid carbon – is a particularly enticing science and engineering goal, as this method produces H2 with a low carbon emission intensity footprint and has an additional benefit of creating solid carbon byproducts with potentially high market value of their own.