Techno-economic analysis of on-site blue hydrogen production based on vacuum pressure adsorption: Practical application to real-world hydrogen refueling stations.

Although climate change can be efficiently curbed by shifting to low-carbon (blue) hydrogen as an energy carrier to achieve carbon neutrality, current hydrogen production mainly proceeds via the gray pathway, i.e., generates large amounts of CO 2 as a byproduct. To address the need for cleaner hydrogen production, we herein propose novel CO 2 capture processes based on the integration of vacuum pressure swing adsorption into a gray hydrogen production process and perform retrofitting to a blue hydrogen production process for on-site hydrogen refueling stations. Techno-economic analysis reveals that the implementation of the proposed capture processes allows one to significantly reduce CO 2 emission while preserving thermal efficiency, and the economic feasibility of this implementation in different scenarios is determined by computing the levelized cost of hydrogen. As a result, blue hydrogen is shown to hold great promise for the realization of sustainable energy usage and the net-zero transition. [Display omitted] • Techno-economic analysis of blue vs. gray on-site H 2 production was performed. • Gray H 2 process was coupled with CO 2 capture via vacuum pressure swing adsorption. • CO 2 emission could be reduced while preserving process thermal efficiency. • Levelized cost of H 2 was compared as economic feasibility for different scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]