D.F. Torgerson Award: Clean hydrogen production demonstration

Adrian Vega, Amir Motamed Dashliborun, Blessing Ibeh, David Ouellette, Hongqiang Li, Lorne Stolberg, Mitchell Morrison, Randy Bent, Sam Suppiah, Stacey Reinwald, and Wenyu Zhang

For the first successful lab scale demonstration of the complete hybrid copper chlorine thermochemical process for clean hydrogen production.

The need for large-scale hydrogen production in Canada without producing greenhouse gases is becoming more important every day. The Hybrid Copper Chloride thermochemical hydrogen production process (known as HCuTEC™) utilizes both heat and electricity to produce hydrogen and oxygen. The process is quite complex, as it consists of four steps that contain multiple streams and pieces of equipment. In April of 2018, the process had been studied in several laboratories for many years, but only one of the four process steps had been demonstrated on a small scale.

The key accomplishment is that from rudimentary lab steps, by the end of March 2022, the CNL project team had developed the complete process to a level where all four steps have been demonstrated and integrated into a laboratory scale process that can produce 100 grams per day of hydrogen. The project also included a proprietary and unique process model simulation, and an optimized integration of process heat management with various heat and electricity sources.

The project team made exceptional efforts to transform a rudimentary simple lab scale demo into a fulsome proprietary, fully integrated, lab scale demonstration of all steps. As a result of their efforts, sufficient data to be ready for further scaling up of the process from the current laboratory scale to a pilot plant or commercial scale. External industrial partners have expressed interest in working with CNL to further develop this process and build a pilot scale plant that will produce 50 kg/d of hydrogen.