(34b) Assessing Thermochemical Routes for Hydrogen Production from Heavy Fuel Oil: Technical and Economic Perspectives

Heavy fuel oil (HFO) is a high carbon residual fraction from crude oil refining, which has high costs and environmental impact when used in conventional combustion applications. HFO is subject to extensive carbon dioxide emissions during direct combustion thus contributing to exacerbating climate change concerns, and its heteroatomic impurities and heavy metals result in emissions to air. This research focused on the other thermochemical pathway to upgrade HFO into valuable energy products by integrated gasification and steam methane reforming. Oxygen-steam gasification of HFO was coupled with downstream syngas processing units for hydrogen production by means of process simulation models. Case 1 is the base scenario which converts HFO into syngas, which in turn is converted into hydrogen. On the other hand, Case 2 proposes an arrangement of gasification and reforming integrated together to increase hydrogen yields through the use of heat from HFO gasification for the reforming of natural gas. Comparison of technical assessment results demonstrate that Case 2 produces greater cold gas and process efficiencies than Case 1 while increasing hydrogen output by over 13%. Furthermore, Case 2 had 25% lower investment cost per ton of hydrogen, 30% higher net present value and lower levelized hydrogen cost compared to existing steam reforming benchmarks. Insights concerning the optimization of syngas quality and maximizing integration between processing stages were extracted from parametric analysis. Overall, this study shows that there is a promising way to use HFO to produce hydrogen as a clean energy carrier with improved process efficiency through thermally coupled gasification and reforming.