Researchers at the University of York have developed a method to produce hydrogen and capture carbon dioxide using organic waste as a feedstock.
For the H2Boost project, a dark fermentation process was used, in which microbes break down organic waste without light, efficiently generating hydrogen and capturing CO2 as by-products.
Funded by the UK government’s £1bn Net Zero Innovation Portfolio (NZIP), H2Boost was led by York University’s Biorenewables Development Centre and carried out in partnership with the University of Leeds.
Penny Cunningham, Programme Operations Manager at the Biorenewables Development Centre, claimed the production represents a “significant technical breakthrough.”
Cunningham added, “Our novel approach to producing clean hydrogen from waste while removing CO2 is not only technically feasible but also holds significant promise for large-scale sustainable energy solutions in the future.”
Under the Department for Energy and Security and Net Zero’s Hydrogen BECCS Innovation Programme, the H2Boost project aims to develop a commercially viable and sustainable process for producing biohydrogen from organic waste.
Gloucestershire-based Wild Hydrogen revealed its hydrogen production process last May, which similarly uses waste materials including wood, plants and compost as a feedstock.
Read more: Wild Hydrogen develops novel hydrogen production tech
The company is now planning to build its first commercial demonstrator to produce hydrogen at scale, ready for 2026.
Levidian: Producing hydrogen within a full circular economy
With more than two billion metric tonnes of municipal solid waste generated worldwide every year according to statista¹, innovators are beginning to consider landfill as an opportunity as opposed to a greenhouse gas (GHG) threat.
Expected to increase by around 70% by 2050 to 3.4 billion tonnes², the release of methane into the atmosphere will also increase, methane being much more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide (CO2) over a 100-year period.
However, by managing the waste and coupling it with technologies that can capture and utilise methane, the harmful gas can be used as a valuable resource whilst also having its environmental impact mitigated.
One example of this is UK-based company, Levidian, and its methane-to-hydrogen and graphene technology, known as LOOP. The process uses methane as a feedstock to produce both hydrogen and Net Zero graphene.
Continue reading here.
