Techno-economic assessment of hydrogen production processes based on various natural gas chemical looping systems with carbon capture

Highlights: • Techno-economic evaluations of natural gas-based hydrogen production processes. • Evaluations of innovative energy efficient looping cycles for hydrogen production. • Iron cycle exhibits the highest energy efficiency and near total decarbonisation rate. • Sorption enhanced reforming has lower energy efficiency and CO₂ capture rate. • As economic performances, iron-based looping cycle has the best performances. -- Abstract: Hydrogen is regarded as a promising energy carrier with several key advantages for future low carbon applications (e.g. no greenhouse gas emission at the point of use, higher energy conversion efficiency). This paper is assessing from a techno-economic point of view, three chemical looping processes suitable for hydrogen production generating high purity hydrogen corresponding to 300 MW thermal output, with a carbon capture rate of at least 90%: i) chemical looping hydrogen production (CLH), ii) sorption enhanced reforming (SER), iii) sorption enhanced chemical-looping reforming (SECLR). Key techno-economic performance indicators were evaluated and compared amongst each other and against a conventional natural gas reforming technology without/with carbon capture by chemical gas-liquid absorption using alkanolamines. The results show that CLH using iron-based (i.e. ilmenite) oxygen carrier seems to be the most promising hydrogen production technology amongst the evaluated systems having the highest energy efficiency at CCR>99%, lower operating and maintenance (O&M) costs, with a hydrogen production cost of 41.84 €/MWh compared to 42.43 €/MWh for no capture conventional reforming and 44.58 €/MWh for amine-based capture with 70% CCR, at a CO₂ emissions avoidance cost of 19.46 €/t_CO2.